Miss Lizzie (28 page)

Annie's house lay a block north of ours on Water Street. Her family, like mine, lived in Boston, but this was their third summer at the shore. She knew more about the neighborhood than I did, as she had often pointed out, and she might even know whether there had ever been a hatchet somewhere in the old shed by the swamp.

Annie opened the door, saw me, and suddenly, without actually withdrawing, seemed to shrink back behind it, using it almost as a shield. “Uh, hello, Amanda.”

“Hi, Annie.” I had expected a more exuberant reaction; but perhaps the past few days had left her feeling a bit awkward. “Come on out, okay? Let's go for a walk.”

She hesitated. “Urn, well, I don't feel very good.” Annie was a poor liar; and now, quite clearly, she was lying. I knew it, and she knew I knew it. She looked down at her shoes, her eyelids fluttering. “I guess not.”

“What is it?” came the voice of Mrs. Holmes, and then she was standing in the doorway, a big-boned officious woman wearing a flowered apron over a brown cotton dress. “Amanda,” she said, her face tightening as she put her hand protectively on Annie's shoulder. “Annie's not feeling well. She needs her rest.”

Annie was, except for Miss Lizzie, my best friend at the shore; her mother had always treated me with kindness. Now they were shutting me out, both of them. Their faces were taut and empty, a pair of blank masks; but what lay beneath them, what revealed itself in their eyes, was fear.

I felt open and exposed, as though my skin had been flayed away to reveal the hot raw flesh beneath.

For a moment I could not breathe, could not find my voice. I swallowed, and weakly I said, “Yes.”

“We'll see you some other time,” said Mrs. Holmes. She forced a brittle smile. “All right, dear?” As though she wished me to ratify the humiliation.

“Yes,” I said meekly, but already she was closing the door.

The rims of my eyes stung like the lips of a wound. I turned and walked down the stairs, my body clumsy. I will not cry, I told myself.
I will not cry
.

I stood for a moment in front of Annie's house, blinking back the acid, wondering what to do. I almost returned to Miss Lizzie's. I had an excuse: I had told her I would make the journey only if Annie came with me. But I remembered how Miss Lizzie had stood up to the crowd yesterday while they taunted her and hurled their idiotic vegetables.
She
had not run away.
I
would not either, not at least from bulky boring witchy Mrs. Holmes and her sniveling treacherous backstabbing daughter. Anger, as it often does, had replaced pain.

A large part of it was directed at myself, for agreeing so quickly, with such cowardice, to my own dismissal; for lacking the courage to call them, to their faces, the bitter names I silently called them now.

Very well, I told myself. I did not need them. If I could live without heaven, I could live without traitors and rats like Mrs. Holmes and Annie. I could live without anyone.

But because the heat wave had ended, all the people were back on the beach, clusters of murmuring adults and giddy children; and as I passed by them, I could hear their whispers and giggles, feel their stares prickle the small of my back. I might believe today that I imagined all this, had I not heard, behind me, a shrill childish voice start to chant, “Lizzie Borden took an axe—” Then the sharp
smack
of palm against skin, followed by a thin high wail.

The tide was up and the breeze was mild, the sun was shining. It was a beautiful day, almost certainly. I really did not notice. I was trying to keep my shoulders squared and maintain my head upright atop a suddenly fragile stalk of neck. For the first time I understood Miss Lizzie's determined walk, that slow relentless march of hers.

The shed, which I believe had once belonged to a fisherman, was simply a shed, abandoned and ramshackle, smelling of dust and sun-scorched wood. As William had said, there were boards scattered about, and empty tin cans and other bits of rubbish. At one corner, an old
Police Gazette
lay curled in a rictus. But along the dust that lined the floor there was no convenient silhouette of a hatchet. I do not know what I should have done if there had been.

Just beyond the shed was the swampy inlet that led to the mouth of the creek. The swamp was about a hundred yards wide and a hundred yards deep. The air seemed thicker here, and smelled of rot and mold. Small dense clouds of midges hovered above the clumps of skunk cabbage and the thickets of marsh grass, nasty stuff with long narrow blades as sharp as swords.

Amid the brackish water and slick black mud were small weeded islands, and between many of these someone had slung old boards to form a sort of meandering passageway. I picked up a stick and stepped out onto one. It sagged beneath me and dipped down into the muck,
smack
, and clammy water gushed in over the tops of my shoes. I shuddered. A pair of pallid fiddler crabs scuttled away, into the grasses.

Carefully, I slid the stick down into the water, into the mud. Water striders skimmed off across the surface. The stick went two feet deep before it stopped.

If a hatchet
had
been thrown in there, somewhere in those five or six acres of slough, no one would ever find it. And last night's storm would have snatched away anything like a towel that might have been floating about.

I left the stick in the glop and stepped back onto solid ground. My shoes were soaked. I sat down on an old stump, untied the laces, took them off. I stripped off my socks, wrung out the yellow swamp water, wrestled them back on, and then tugged on the shoes. They looked perfectly presentable, but felt terrible against my feet, cold and damp.

I looked around the swamp. Except for the shifting swarms of midges, everything was still. But I knew that behind the quiet, down where the blades of marsh grass poked through the sodden earth, the place was slithering with life. Rats and snakes, leeches and slugs, chiggers and beetles and centipedes.

And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a sudden quick flicker of movement. Off to my left, in the woods.

I might have imagined it. But just then, as the fear shivered along my skin, I did not think so. Over there, in the shadows between the trees, something had moved. Or someone.

And I cannot say why, but I was certain that it was Audrey's murderer.

I saw him, in my mind's eye, watching from behind a tree, hatchet in hand, waiting for his chance to come at me. He had passed me over when he slaughtered Audrey, but now he would correct that mistake.

And then, from the same part of the woods, another flutter of movement: The branches of a small tree trembled.

Suddenly I felt very much alone. The swamp was silent and the woods were abruptly darker, abruptly thicker. I was far from the nearest help. And out of earshot: If I were to scream, no one would hear me. If he killed me here, hacked at me, shattered me with his weapon, he could push my body deep into that black, foul-smelling ooze, and no one would ever find it.

I stood up and began to walk back along the path toward the beach, my shoes squishing beneath me. I walked calmly, slowly—I did not want to alert him, to let him know that I was aware of him. But I
was
aware, acutely so; I could feel the weight of his stare all along my body.

When I got back to the beach and saw the people up ahead, the same people whose whispers had disturbed me earlier, I was shamelessly glad to see them. And by the time I reached the street again, heading for the police station to talk to Father about William, I had convinced myself that I had imagined that presence in the woods, that no one had actually been there. That the movement I saw had been, at most, a squirrel; perhaps a rabbit.

But, as I later learned, I was wrong. Someone
had
been in the woods that day; someone
had
been watching me.

The policeman sitting behind the big desk in the lobby of the police station, a middle-aged fat man with a shiny bald scalp, told me that Father had gone to Boston. When I asked to see William, he seemed suddenly embarrassed. “Well now, he says he don't want to see nobody.”

“But I'm his sister.”

“I know that, miss. But he don't want to see nobody, he says. Even a prisoner's got his rights, see. He don't wanna see nobody, he don't see nobody.”

“Is the chief of police here?”

“He's a busy man, the chief is.”

“Can I see him?”

He frowned. “He's talkin' with Tommy Medley just now.”

“Please? Could you ask him? It won't take long.”

He shrugged. “I'll check. But I can't promise nothin'. On account of he's busy, see, like I said.”

He got up from the desk, walked over to a door on his right, knocked on it, waited, opened it and stuck his head in for a moment. Leaving the door open, he returned to the desk. He shrugged again, defeated or surprised or both. “He says to come ahead.”

In his single-sleeved starched white shirt, Chief Da Silva sat starchly upright behind the desk. Officer Medley, who had been sitting in a chair to my left, stood up. “Hi, Amanda.” He grinned earnestly.

“Hello.” This was the man who had dragged my brother from my grandparents' house: he would get from me nothing more than curtness.

He said, “I guess it's been a rough week for you, hasn't it?”

“Yes,” I said, and turned to Da Silva. “Could I please talk to you?”

Da Silva nodded. “Certainly. Have a seat.” He turned to Officer Medley. “I'll expect to hear from you by tonight, then.”

“Yessir. Bye, Amanda.” Another grin.

“Good-bye,” I said.
Rat
. I sat down.

Medley left, closing the door behind him, and Da Silva said, “Now. How can I help you?”

“My brother didn't do it.”

He nodded noncommittally, his dark eyes as unreadable as ever.

“He wouldn't do something like that.”

He nodded again. “I agree.”

I had been about to continue; caught off guard, I said, “What?”

“I don't believe he killed your stepmother.”

Indignant: “Then what are you keeping him here for?”

He made his small quick smile. “One. By all the evidence, he left town shortly after the time the murder occurred. Two. He didn't come forward voluntarily. Three. An article of his clothing was proved to contain bloodstains that matched the blood group of the deceased—”

“But they match
his
too. He's got the same kind of blood.”

“I'm aware of that. Four. He's confessed.”

So William had actually done it. The fool. The silly, silly fool. “But he's lying,” I said.

He nodded. “I agree. But so long as he maintains that he killed her, I can't do a thing. All the evidence in our possession suggests his guilt. He had motive, means, and opportunity.”

“But you
know
he didn't do it.”

He gave me a small brisk shake of his head. “I
believe
he didn't do it. I learned a long time ago that what I believe and what a court accepts as evidence are two completely different things.”