Miss Lizzie (42 page)

On Friday, when I went off to examine the shed by the swamp, Miss Lizzie had somehow, using the telephone, tracked him down and sent him after me. He had picked me up at Annie Holmes's house and followed me. His was the presence I had sensed in the woods, his was the. stare I had felt along my skin.

At night, too, he had watched the house. I do not know when he slept, or if he managed to sleep at all.

But on Saturday Boyle had been forced to go to Boston, and so Miss Lizzie had conscripted Mr: Foley.

As a precaution, it had not been very successful. Mr. Foley had been killed and so, very nearly, had I.

Now, as we sat there in Miss Lizzie's parlor (for the last time, as it happened), I said to her, “How do you think Audrey found out about Mrs. Mortimer and Kevin?”

After talking to Kevin Mortimer in Boston, Boyle had verified that during the War, while his brother was fighting in France, Kevin had conducted an affair with Mrs. Mortimer.

Miss Lizzie said, “I don't know. Perhaps Mrs. Mortimer told her herself.”

“Or maybe it was that Mrs. Marlowe.”

“That may be. We'll never know for certain, I'm afraid.”

“Do you think Audrey was blackmailing Mrs. Mortimer? For money?”

She frowned. “Again, I doubt we'll ever know. But I suspect, from what we know of your stepmother, that whether money came into it or not, she was using the information as a form of power over Mrs. Mortimer, a way of controlling her. Perhaps Mrs. Mortimer couldn't stand it any longer. Or perhaps your stepmother's threats to tell the story had become more serious.”

“I guess,” I said, “that there's a lot we'll never know.”

Miss Lizzie smiled. “I guess,” she said, “there is.”

We left that night for Boston, Father and William and I. Neither my father nor my brother wanted to return to the shore; I did, but I was outvoted. When I telephoned Miss Lizzie to tell her, she told me that she was leaving as well, going back to Fall River. We would see each other, she said, we would visit; but although we sent cards and letters to each other for a few years, we never did.

Officially, no one in Fall River ever learned of what happened between Miss Lizzie and Mrs. Mortimer. Chief Da Silva and the rest of the local authorities hushed up the entire thing. Two axe murders within a week were fairly bad publicity for a resort town.

During that last week, unbeknownst to me, as were so many things during that week, Father had arranged for Audrey's body to be shipped to Boston. The funeral services were held on Wednesday, two days after we returned to the city. It was there, for the first time, that I met her parents. A sad silent pair with an air of resigned disappointment, they returned afterward to their home somewhere in Nebraska, and I never saw them again.

I met Susan St. Clair within a month after our return to Boston. Nothing like I expected, she was a bright, lovely, capable woman, totally unaffected (and not at all French). Even before she and Father married, we had become friends. It was she who explained to me the mysteries of Sex (some of them, anyway; no one knows them all). Had I known about them that summer, I should have begun to understand the relationship between Father and Susan, between William and Marge Grady, between Mr. Chatsworth and Mrs. Archer. And perhaps begun to understand the relationships that (perhaps) existed between Audrey and William, and between Miss Lizzie and the actress, Nance O'Neil.

When I began this account, several years ago, I wrote to an old friend in the States and asked for any information he could obtain about Nance. He was able to verify all that Miss Lizzie had told me and to provide some additional facts.

A leading lady of the stage at the turn of the century, beautiful and immensely talented; she became in the late twenties and early thirties a well-regarded character actress in films. Among many other roles, she played Felice Venable in the cinema version of
Cimmaron
. During the early 1960s, she lived on 34th Street in New York (less than two blocks, as it happened, from where I, unknowing, lived at the time), and she died at the Actor's Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1965.

There were many other deaths before hers. One by one, all the people I knew that summer walked off the edge of the world and disappeared. William went first. He died in 1937 in Spain, fighting with the Abraham Lincoln brigade. Father died in 1938, and Susan in 1952. Roger Drummond became a reporter and finally a bureau chief for
Time
magazine, and died in 1960.

Harry Boyle and I wrote letters to each other until he died of lung cancer in Florida, in 1943. I wrote the first letter in care of the Boston Pinkerton office, asking him where Mrs. Archer had been that last Saturday. She had been in New Haven, he wrote, seeing still another “boyfriend.”

There is one final loose strand.

Miss Lizzie died in 1927, in Fall River. We had not corresponded for some time; like most other people, I read of her death in the newspaper.

In 1930 I was living on West End Avenue in New York while I attended Columbia Law School. One hot August afternoon I received a special delivery package, heavy, perhaps eight inches wide and deep, and sixteen inches long.

I carried it into the kitchen, set it down on the table, and opened the wrapping. Inside was the teak jewelry box, trimmed with gold, I had seen on Miss Lizzie's dressing table eight years before.

Taped to its top was a note addressed to me in my married name. I opened it and read:

As you may know, Miss Lizbeth A. Borden died in 1927. The bulk of her estate was bequeathed to two different animal shelters, but litigation between the two has delayed the distribution of the estate's remainder. I am pleased to say, however, that this issue has now been resolved and that Miss Borden's last wishes may finally be honored. Miss Borden personally requested to me that you receive the enclosed. Please acknowledge receipt at your soonest possible convenience.

It was signed Peter M. Wilburforce.

When I opened the box, suddenly from inside it rose a thin metallic tune I had not heard for eight years. Some hand, at some earlier time—Mr. Wilburforce's? Miss Lizzie's?—had wound the mechanism. The music played, and repeated itself, and slowly died.

Inside the box, lying on the shelf, was a single playing card. I carried the box and the card into my husband's study and set the box, closed, on his desk, then lay the card beside it.

He had been sulking for an hour or so; our usual disagreement: He hated New York. Now he looked up, his green eyes puzzled, and he said, “It's very pretty, but what is it?”

“It's from Miss Lizzie,” I told him. “She left it to me in her will.”

He picked up the playing card, turned it over, turned it back. “Six of hearts. Is that significant?”

I shook my head. “Only a reminder.”

Slowly, thoughtfully, he tapped the card against the lid of the box. “Imagine,” he said, “if she didn't do it, didn't kill her parents, how lonely she must've been.”

I stroked the back of his head, the black hair beginning now to gray. “Imagine how lonely she must've been if she did.”

There was one thing I had never told Darryl. It was something that happened that night eight years ago, when Miss Lizzie drank brandy in front of the dressing-table mirror. Toward the end of it, her speech slurred slightly, she had looked at me and said, “Life. People. The mind of God. That's the important thing, Amanda. Not wood or steel or land. Not property. I chose property over people once, and I shall always suffer for it.”

Until Roger Drummond told me about the transfer of land from Miss Lizzie to her mother, I had thought she meant the farm of Nance O'Neil.

I had always wondered whether she ever actually told anyone—Nance, perhaps. I had always wondered if, in some isolate, wounded part of her being, she had wanted to tell, had wanted to confess.

It had been a hatchet, of course, that Miss Lizzie had reflexively chosen as a weapon that night when she went off to meet the anonymous caller—Mrs. Mortimer.

In the Nikola system, the mnemonic pair of images for the position of the six of hearts are a
mother
and a
hatchet
.

I left Darryl to his work and carried the box into the bedroom and rested it on my own dressing table. I opened it, lay the card on its shelf, and stared down at it for a long while. And when at last I brought down the lid of the box and sealed the card away, I felt the same sense of ending, of completion—although I knew that Miss Lizzie and all the others from that summer would be with me forever—that one feels when one finishes the final chapter and, with a smile or perhaps a sigh, closes the book.

Acknowledgments

In Thailand, I'd like to thank Joe West, Dusty Rhodes, Igor and Buayem Studnar at Buayem's Books, and, for his help and chili con carne, Gabe Vallicelli at The Fountain restaurant. Anyone who finds himself with a hankering for American or Italian food while stranded on Koh Samui is advised to check out Gabe's place.

In the southwest United States, I'd like to thank Jim and Donna Ballin in Phoenix, all the staff at the Coronada Waldenbooks in Albuquerque, and the librarians at the Wyoming branch of the Albuquerque Public Library. Chuck Fair, of Office Incorporated, Santa Fe, has once again been extremely generous, and I'm grateful. Dr. Roger Smithpeter, vascular surgeon and man about town, has been a good friend.

In particular, I want to thank Jeanne W. Satterthwait (Hi Mom) and Jonathan and Claudia Richards, without whose help this book might never have been finished.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1989 by Walter Satterthwait

ISBN: 978-1-4532-5124-9

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