An Air That Kills (22 page)

“Oh, nothing much. I mean, it's hard to describe an ordinary-looking woman. Except her hair, it's really beauti­ful.” Miss Gillespie glanced at the picture again and handed it back with a puzzled frown. “Did you say the boy's name was Ronnie?”

“Yes.”

“I'm sure you're mistaken. Or I am. One of us is.”

“Why?”

“That boy is little Harry Bream.”

TWENTY-TWO

The house lay high in the hills and at the foot of a cliff, behind the city. The mailbox at the beginning of the curving concrete driveway was shaped like an old-fashioned stage­coach. It bore no name, only the street number 2479. The hinged doors were open, and the mail delivered but not yet picked up—a copy of
Life
magazine, nothing more.

A wind was blowing down the canyon. It shook the rows of eucalyptus trees, and the pods struck the roof of the car and rattled off with the sound of scurrying mice.

The house itself was simple and elegant, of stained red­wood, with a wide expanse of patio which had recently been hosed down. Steam rose from the flagstones as if secret fires were smoldering underneath. Except for the rising steam there was no sign that the house was now occupied. Turee pressed the door chime, waited, pressed it again several times, but no one answered.

He crossed the patio and picked his way down a steep path through massed geraniums to the rear of the house. Here he found a second patio, more secluded, shaded by a plexiglass roof and decorated with camellias in redwood tubs.

He saw the child first, sitting quietly in a sandbox, com­pletely absorbed in the operations of a dump truck. Then he saw the woman. She may have been inside the house and seen his car stop, or she may merely have heard the door chime and the unfamiliar footsteps on the path. At any rate, she seemed to be expecting him, waiting for him. She was sitting bolt upright, tense, in a canvas sling chair made for lounging. Her hands were pressed tightly against her knees as if they had been frozen there.

“Hello, Thelma.”

Her only response to the greeting was a blink of her eyes.

“It's been a long time.”

“Not long enough. Not nearly long enough.” She watched warily as he approached. “How did you find me?”

“Through the picture of the boy.”

“Yes. That was a mistake, wasn't it? Well, it can't be helped now.” She leaned back in the chair and looked up at the sky, as if she were making some silent plea. “I was afraid that some day I'd be sitting here just like this and suddenly you'd turn up. Now that it's happening, it hardly seems real.”

“It's real.”

“Yes.”

“How is Charley?”

There was no response.

“And Anne?”

This time, by way of answer, she gave a tired little shrug.

“There never was any Charley,” Turee said. “Or any Anne. There never was—a lot of things.”

“That doesn't sound very grammatical, but it's true, of course. There never was any Charley, or any Anne.”

“Just you and Harry?”

“Just Harry and me.”

“And Ron?”

“Ron.” She spoke the name as if it were one she hadn't heard or thought about for a long time. “Yes. You'll be wanting to talk about Ron, of course?”

“Won't you?”

She smiled crookedly. “Not exactly. I—sit down, Ralph. I'd better put the baby to bed for his nap.” Climbing awk­wardly out of the sling chair, she crossed the patio to the sandbox where the boy was playing and held out her arms. “Come on, wee one. Put the truck down for now. It's time for our nap.”

Wee one let out a rather perfunctory howl of protest.

“Now, Harry, don't make a fuss. We have company. Come say hello to the man.”

Harry crawled out of the sandbox on all fours, grinned shyly at Turee, and ran ahead of his mother into the house, slamming the screen door behind him.

“I won't be long,” Thelma said. “He's very good about naps. He's a—I wish . .”

She pressed her hand to her throat as if to ease the pain of the unspoken words. Then she turned and walked swiftly into the house.

Turee wondered what she'd been going to say.
He's a wonderful boy—I wish you'd go away and leave us alone—I wish you had never come . . .

Sounds filtered out of the kitchen, the opening and closing of a refrigerator door, the clink of glassware, the whirring of a mixer.

“Here's your orange juice, Harry.”

“I want milk.”

“Now, dear, you can't have milk, you know what the doctor said.”

“I want milk.”

“You know something, Harry? When I was a little girl we didn't have oranges the way you do now. Only at Christ­mas time did I see an orange, and then it looked too beautiful to eat, like pure gold. So I used to keep it in my room, dreaming of the day I'd eat it. But I never did eat it because it got all hard and shriveled and it was no good any more.”

It seemed that she was talking not to the child but to Turee, trying to explain, to excuse: the orange of pure gold which she had plucked was shriveled.

“There, you drank it all up like a good boy. Now come on, off to bed with you.”

Images rose to the surface of Turee's mind like a series of colliding bubbles, each of them bursting until the final one remained fixed and clear. A figure in white. The nurse at the hospital after Harry's accident, with the phony smile and starched behind.

Miss Hutchins. He'd met her only once, over two years ago. He hadn't expected ever to see or think of her again, yet she had traveled nimbly over the years and miles to reap­pear on Thelma's sunlit patio and talk about Harry: “. . . dead drunk when they brought him in—his blood alcohol test showed only one-tenth of one percent—that's not nearly intoxication level in a normal person—he's the kind that can't hold his liquor.”

But Harry had always been able to hold his liquor very well. Long after Winslow had slid under the table and Galloway was retching over the railing of somebody's back porch and Turee himself had reached a state of doldrums, Harry would still be bouncing around, the life of the party.

He hadn't been dead drunk, then. He'd been pretending. He'd been acting out one of a series of scenes, expertly timed, carefully planned, with himself in the role of tragic victim to distract attention from the real victim, Galloway. The whole thing had been staged, right from the first telephone call to Thelma from Wiarton, to the final letter about his new job with the oil company in Bolivia. And the gullible audience reacted as they were expected to. Act one, poor Harry, what a terrible break for such a nice guy. Act two, Harry starts on his brave search for a new life and finds it. Act three, Harry gradually fades away into the oil fields of Bolivia.

Bolivia, yet. My God, what fools we all were. We never questioned any of it for a minute. Thelma's renunciation of Harry, his attempt and failure to win her back, her courageous persistence in carrying on alone, her refusal to answer his letters, her reaction to his “marriage”—none of it had been real. All the time the Breams were supposedly drawing farther apart, they were binding themselves closer and closer to each other, not only by ties of love but by the stronger ones of guilt.

Thelma came out of the house. She had put on a sweater and was buttoning it at the neck, as if for her the day had suddenly turned chilly. “I called Harry at the office. He'll be right home.”

“He has a job?”

“No. He's at the doctor's. He hasn't been well.” She hesitated over the final word, then spoke very quickly to cover the hesitation. “You look fine, Ralph. How is Nancy? And the children? Are they with you?”

“No. They're all up at the lodge for the summer.”

“The lodge, how far away that seems, and long ago. I wish—well, it doesn't matter now.” She sat down in the green canvas glider and began to swing back and forth, as if, childlike, she found comfort in the motion of rocking. “You came all the way out here to find Harry and me?”

“Not Harry. You.”

“You didn't expect to find Harry?”

“No,” Turee said, coloring slightly. “I thought—we all thought he was in Bolivia.”

“Naturally.” She sounded grave, but a trace of sardonic humor flickered in her eyes for a moment. “That was Harry's idea, about the oil job in Bolivia. Harry's very—imaginative.”

Once again she hesitated over the final word, as if other phrases had occurred to her first, more damaging and more precise ones which her personal censor refused to pass. She must have realized that her hesitancy had piqued Turee's curiosity, for she added by way of explanation, “It's very hard to describe someone you love deeply. Try it.”

“This hardly seems the time or place.”

“Perhaps not.”

“Who dreamed up Charley?”

“Harry.”

“He threw a boomerang. If it weren't for Charley I wouldn't be here. I was suspicious of him. I wanted to make sure you and the boy were all right.”

“You came here because of Charley? How funny. How terribly
funny.”
She didn't laugh, though. She merely swung back and forth on the glider, her eyes fixed on Turee's face. “What are you going to do now?”

“I'm not sure. It's a very complex situation.”

“Don't hurt Harry. Please don't hurt Harry.”

“How can I help it?”

“Blame me. I'm the one responsible. I planned everything.”

He didn't believe her but he kept his doubts to himself. “Why?”

“Why? There wasn't any one why
.
There were dozens, going back years. I'd always resented Ron, the way he had everything handed to him on a platter, the way he used to order Harry around. It rankled to see Harry toady to him.” She paused. “Poor Harry, he's always had such bad luck.”

Perhaps Harry's worst luck had been meeting Thelma, but apparently this notion didn't occur to her.

“Like your coming here and finding us like this,” she said. “Sheer bad luck.”

“Someone would have found you eventually.”

“No. You were the only person interested enough to try. And you would never have found me if it hadn't been for the picture of little Harry. I wanted to show him off, I couldn't help it. That was my mistake. Pride. Vanity.”

“Not pride or vanity. Your mistake was greed.”

“I didn't want anything for myself, only for my husband and my child.”

“And the child belongs . . .”

“To Harry,” she said sharply. “He is
Harry's
child. Ron never came near me until I was certain I was pregnant. Then, of course, I arranged it. I had to. It was part of our plan, the hardest part of all for me, but the most vital. Ron had to believe sincerely that the baby was his. Otherwise Harry could never have persuaded him to write the final letter to Esther, which was so necessary to the suicide buildup.”

“Persuaded?”

“No force was necessary. Ron had been drinking before he arrived, and he had more, some Scotch, with Harry and me. He was always easy to handle when he was drunk. Besides, when he found out about the baby, he was so overcome with guilt and shame he actually
wanted
to confess, to atone, in some way, for what he'd done to Harry and to Esther.”

“Harry told him what to write?”

“Harry suggested. Ron was too upset to do his own think­ing. He was very fond of Harry, you know. Everyone was. Everyone is, I mean.” Color splashed her face. “What a silly mistake, using the past tense like that, as if he were dead or something.”

“Or as if he had changed.”

“He hasn't changed, not a bit.”

But the denial was too quick and too vigorous, and Turee wondered what the years of pretense and deceit, of remorse and guilt, had done to Harry. “The phone call Ron made to Dorothy Galloway's house the night he died . . .”

“It wasn't Ron. Harry made the call. Like the letter, it was part of the suicide buildup. The idea of suicide had to be so strongly implanted ahead of time that no one would even think of murder. Because if anyone had thought of it, if any­one had started to make a real investigation, Harry and I were wide open. Neither of us could account for our time that Saturday night. Harry didn't make any emergency call at a clinic in Mimico, he was with me, waiting for Ron, waiting to go ahead with our plan. Nor did his car break down, the excuse he gave you and the others for being late arriving at the lodge. He wasn't even driving the car. I was. I was following him so that when the time came he could take over our car and go on ahead to the lodge. It was a tight schedule but we'd planned very carefully. Harry drove me into Meaford and I caught the 10:30 bus back to Weston. I arrived home barely ten minutes before Harry's phone call from Wiarton.”

“That was planned too, of course?”

“Every word.”

Turee looked bewildered, confused. “I can't—I can't quite believe it.”

“I can't quite believe it myself, sometimes.”

She turned her head suddenly as if she'd heard a sound she'd been waiting for and knew well. Half a minute later Harry appeared from around the side of the house.