Miss Lizzie (18 page)

I stood at the guest-room door, and I saw before me a tall, dark figure bending over Audrey. His back to me, he wore black trousers and a long black Edwardian coat. I saw him raise his arm, saw the gleam of the hatchet's head, saw his arm swing down and turn the metal to a blur, heard the wet
crunch
as it smashed into flesh and bone. He raised it again, swung again, and again came the brittle snapping sound; and he raised it again and again, and blood was flying now in spurts across the room.

I cried out in horror, and he wheeled about and saw me, and I saw him,
and I recognized his face
.

… I awoke with a whimper in my throat, and the face vanished. I tried to will it back, desperately tried to recall those familiar features; but the face was gone.

Gray light seeped through the window. The tide was coming in: I could hear the waves wash against the shore. But they did not sound like sand and water; they sounded like the scrape of steel on gravel, the slow plodding measured beat of someone filling in a grave.

I lay there, the room gradually forming itself around me, until I heard Miss Lizzie begin to move about.

Miss Lizzie made griddle cakes, and we ate them in the dining room. The crowd outside the house was much smaller today. Officer O'Hara, who had come in earlier to borrow the use of the facilities again, told me that these were “only the riff-raff, the town scum,” which did not, as I fancy he intended, much comfort me.

I looked up from my plate and asked Miss Lizzie, “What about the good people?”

She appeared puzzled. “What, Amanda?”

“Do you believe there's a heaven they go to?”

She smiled. “I think that the good people, the truly good people, are already in a kind of heaven.”

“And the truly bad people?”

She paused, her teacup raised halfway to her lips. “The truly bad people, yes, are already in a kind of hell.” She took a sip of tea, set the cup down, touched the napkin to her mouth, and said, as though to herself, “I really must get out today and do some shopping.”

“But Miss Lizzie! All those people outside.…”

“Rabble,” she said lightly. “What can they do to me? Gawp and stare? No, I've let them have their way entirely too long.”

“But Mr. Boyle and Mr. Slocum are coming. With the people who answered your advertisement.”

She pursed her lips. “Afterward, then. I refuse to be kept a prisoner in my own house.”

But the first visitor to Miss Lizzie's that morning was neither Mr. Slocum nor Mr. Boyle, nor any of their entourage of potential witnesses.

THIRTEEN

“THERE'S A YOUNG gentleman,” said Officer O'Hara, poking his ruddy face around the edge of the door, “to see Miss Amanda.”

The time was just a little before ten o'clock; we had been in the parlor when he heard the knock on the door. Now as Miss Lizzie looked at me, I looked at Officer O'Hara and asked him, “Who?”

“Carl Drummond's son, Roger.” To Miss Lizzie he confided, “He's a fine lad, works at the candy store, you needn't worry about
that
one.”

“It's up to Miss Burton,” she said. Officer O'Hara's approbation cut very little ice with Miss Lizzie.

“Would it be all right with you?” I asked her.

“Of course, child.” To O'Hara she spoke as though she were addressing a servant. “Please show the young man in.”

The face folded into a sour frown, ducked away, and a moment later Roger stepped through the door.

With all that had happened over the last few days, the thought of Roger had never entered my mind. Now I wondered why.

Still tall and dark and lean (although neither so tall nor so lean as Mr. Slocum), and still as handsome as Heathcliff (although not so handsome as Mr. Slocum), he wore a natty seersucker suit, a white shirt, a black tie, and black high-topped boots. He grinned at me, showing all his teeth. “Hi, Amanda.”

“Hello, Roger.” I introduced him to Miss Lizzie. Both of them were stiffly formal, Miss Lizzie, I imagined, because by then she would be wary of any stranger; and Roger—well, I would learn shortly why Roger was so restrained.

“I was wondering,” he told her, “if I could talk to Amanda.”

“Certainly,” she said. To me: “Amanda, why don't you and your guest talk in the parlor.” To Roger, politely: “Would you care for some tea?”

“No, thanks.” After a second's hesitation, he added, “Ma'am.”

Miss Lizzie told me, “If you need anything, I'll be upstairs in my room.”

I thanked her and, as she left, showed Roger into the parlor. I felt quite assured and adult, rather as though the room, the house, were my own, and Roger a gentleman caller come to ask my hand.

He sat down on the sofa and, with a glance toward the parlor door, said, “So that's her, huh?”

I sat opposite him in the armchair. “Yes. She's been really wonderful, Roger.”

He leaned forward. “She's a psychopath, Amanda.”

“What's a psychopath?”

“A crazy person. A loon.”

I laughed. “Oh, Roger, she is not. She's one of the nicest people I've ever met.”

“She killed her parents.”

“She did not,” I protested. “The jury said so. She was innocent.”

“The jury said she wasn't guilty.”

“That's what I
said
.”

He shook his head. “It's not the same thing. Look, do you know anything about the trial?”

“I know they found her innocent, or not guilty, or whatever. They let her go.”

He glanced toward the door again, leaned closer, and lowered his voice. I noticed, as I had before, how long his black eyelashes were, longer and finer than my own. (It seemed unfair that a boy could have lashes like those.) Maybe he was not so handsome, so dashing, as Mr. Slo-cum, but through my sins I had lost Mr. Slocum, and Roger, with his dark-brown liquid eyes, his poetic cheekbones, would make a not-altogether unpleasant alternative. “I've read all about it,” he assured me. “They've got books in the library and copies of the
Boston Herald
from the time the trial took place. And I've talked to people who were there.”

“What people?”

“Chief Da Silva, for one.”

“Chief Da Silva doesn't like Miss Lizzie.”

He snorted. “I'll say. He doesn't like her because he knows she did it, and she got away with it.”

“She
didn't
do it.”

“Look,” he said. “Did you know the murders took place in August, on the hottest day of the year?”

“So what?”

“Well, for one thing, the number of homicides goes up whenever the temperature is over ninety-eight point six. Body temperature. People get irritated. People who are a little bit crazy get even crazier.”

“Who says so, Roger?”

“It's a scientific fact. And for another thing, the Bordens had a barn in their backyard, okay? It was just a little carriage house, really, but they all called it a barn. They were like that.”

“Like what?”

“You know. Stuck up.”

“Who says?”

“Everybody.” He waved a hand dismissively. “It doesn't matter, okay? They called it a barn. And the barn had a loft.”

The loft
, I thought. Perhaps now I would learn what all this talk about the loft had meant.

“The loft had one entrance,” Roger said, “a trapdoor at the top of a stairway up from the barn, and it had one window, and that was glass, and it was locked. Now at the trial, when they asked her where she'd been that morning, Lizzie said she'd gone up into the loft to get some pieces of lead. She was going to Marion in a few days, she said, and she wanted to use the lead for sinkers on a fishing line.”

“Roger, I don't see the point to all this.”

“Let me finish. First of all, when she went out to the barn, her mother had already been dead for two hours. The medical evidence proved that. Lizzie said she thought her mother was out. Her father was lying down, she said, in the sitting room, asleep. He'd just gotten back from downtown. Okay, she goes up to the loft to get this lead, and she stays there, she says, for fifteen minutes. She
says
”—sarcasm curled around the word—“that she stood at the window and ate a few pears.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“On the hottest day of the year? In a closed-in loft? She stood there for fifteen minutes eating
pears
?”

“Maybe she couldn't find those pieces of lead, and she was trying to remember where they were.”

“Come
on
, Amanda,” he said, scorn twisting his face. It made his cheekbones seem a good deal less poetic. “There was a box with some lead in it, but it was
down-stairs
, not in the loft.”

“But there
was
lead in the barn.”

He rolled his eyes theatrically. “All right. Chief Da Silva was only a constable in Fall River. But he was one of the first cops on the scene. While the neighbors and the other cops were talking to Lizzie in the house—”

“Stop calling her
Lizzie
.”

He looked at me, surprised. “What
should
I call her?”

“Miss Borden.”

He laughed. Scornfully. Roger was looking less and less a likely marriage prospect.

I said, “It sounds nasty the way you say it.
Lizzie
. She's not your friend. It's rude.”

“She kills her parents with an axe, and I'm the one who's rude?”

“She
didn't
kill them.”

He sighed elaborately. “While the other policemen were talking to
Miss Borden
in the house, Da Silva went into the barn. He went up into the loft. He stood there at the trapdoor and he held his head at eye level with the floor. He looked all around. There were no footprints in the dust, Amanda. None. And there was plenty of dust—even
Miss Borden
admitted at the trial that no one in the family had been up there for months.
There were no footprints
.”

“So why didn't Da Silva say so at the trial?”

“He did. And the defense brought in two kids who said they'd been playing in the loft that morning,
before
all this happened. Which naturally made Da Silva look like a liar, because if the kids
had
been up there, they would've left footprints all over the place.”

“So Da Silva
was
a liar.”

“Amanda,” he said, with that heavy patience which intentionally fails to disguise its opposite, “the kids had been paid off. Like Bridget, the Bordens' maid, had been paid off.”

“By who?”

“By whom, you mean.” He smiled. Insufferably. “By your friend,
Miss Borden
.”

“That's crazy. If Da Silva wasn't lying, he just made a mistake. He didn't see the footprints.”

“He's a good cop, Amanda. He knew what he saw up there. There were no footprints. Why do you think he left Fall River? Because he
knew
she'd done it, and he knew that by paying off those kids, she'd made him look like a liar or a fool.”

“Roger,” I said, “give me one good reason why Miss Lizzie would kill her parents.”

“Sex,” he said, and sat back triumphantly, like someone who had just cut an ace from a blind deck.

“Sex? What are you talking about?” Sex was a thing, like adultery, about which my information was inadequate. It was much in the news, with priests and ministers across the nation denouncing the lax morals of the postwar generation; but no one had ever explained precisely in what direction this laxity lay. In school I had heard tales of petting parties and something called French kissing; but, as naughty and vaguely intriguing as they had sounded, I could not imagine why everyone made such a fuss over them.

Roger shrugged casually. “She denied her sexual impulses, and because they didn't have any way to release themselves, they turned violent. It's a classic case of repression.”