The Hamlet Trap (17 page)

“Did you advise counseling, psychiatric help of any kind?”

“No. We talked about it a couple of times, but I felt that she would come around. My God, it was a shock. Anyone would have reacted.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said, accepting a glass from Sandy. “Just one more thing. How sick is Shannon Tessler? Is she too ill for me to ask her a question or two?”

Constance felt a jolt of surprise and saw the same surprise on the faces of both Jack and Sandy.

Jack lifted his martini and sipped it, thinking. This time he did not consult with his wife. Looking at the olive in his glass, fishing for it with a pick, he said, almost carelessly, “You can ask her anything you want. She's about as ill as I am.”

The doorbell rang and he looked relieved. “That's probably Ro. Excuse me.” He went to open the door.

Ro looked worn and tired. He was dressed in a blue suede jacket, navy slacks, the best-dressed man in town, but for once his appearance was not dapper and advertisement-perfect. There was a slump to his shoulders now, and his walk was without its usual bounce.

Jack looked at him critically when Sandy handed him a martini. “You sleeping, Ro?”

Ro greeted Charlie and Constance, thanked Sandy, and sat down before he replied. “Hell no. And you wouldn't either if Ginnie was yours. I'm worried about her, Jack. Really worried.”

“Well, you're not helping her any by staying awake all night. I'll give you something. I've got some samples upstairs.” He left.

Ro looked at Charlie. “Do you think they'll let her go away for a while?”

“I don't know. I doubt it.”

“She needs to get away, get some rest. They haven't ordered her not to take a trip.”

Jack returned with a small bottle. He handed it to Ro, who slipped it into his pocket without looking at it. “Take a couple of them half an hour before bed.”

“Thanks. I'll do that. Right now there's just so damned much to do…”

“If I were you,” Charlie said to Ro, “I'd talk it over with Ralph Wedekind before I advised Ginnie about a trip. It could be damaging.”

Ro sighed. “You have a daughter, is that right?” Constance nodded. “You know how it is then. When they're small you want to arrange the world for them, and you can almost do it, make things come out all right most of the time. When they're small it's not so hard, is it?”

“It's always tempting to think that when they're grown up you won't have to worry about them anymore,” Constance said. “The worries are just different ones.”

Pretty Boy flew to Ro's chair and perched, saying, “Hot shit, hot shit.” Sandy shooed him away and he left, saying, “Damn, damn, damn.”

“And that's your fault,” Sandy said with resignation.

Ro grinned. “If he could project just a little bit more, I'd make him a star.”

Charlie laughed. “He'd think he had discovered freedom, loose in the theater.” He finished his drink and shook his head at Sandy, who reached for his glass. “Mr. Cavanaugh, when you saw Gray Wilmot leave the high-school auditorium, did you notice the time?”

“Not really. I know I started to leave at nine, but it was raining too hard. I growled at it a minute or so, then went back to the auditorium. I was on the opposite side from him. By the time I realized he was leaving and I got back out to the front hall, he was already outside, out of sight. The rain was coming down harder than ever. Five after nine, maybe ten after. Not later than that.”

“Maybe the people you had to disturb to get out noticed the time. Did you know any of them?”

“I always take an aisle seat,” he said almost apologetically. “I can't stand being a captive audience if the play's really bad. Besides, I didn't sit down again after that. I stood in the back of the auditorium. I was looking for almost anyone I could get a ride with.” He fingered his suede jacket and said ruefully, “I wasn't dressed for rain any more than I am right now. I have an aversion to getting wet.”

“Don't blame you,” Charlie said, and looked at Constance. “We'd better be on our way. Thanks for letting us see the birds, and for the drinks.”

In the car Constance asked, “Why do you want to talk to Shannon?”

“Oh, I thought she might know the times that William was in and out both those nights. I noticed that Sunshine doesn't wear a watch. More than that, though. I'm curious about her, about all of them the way they were thirty years ago. Did you know Ginnie would remember what happened the day of the fire?”

“I thought she might. She was reacting to that day, not Peter Ellis's death. I think she wandered into her kitchen that day and saw her father on the floor. Seeing Peter Ellis dead stimulated that memory that had been repressed all these years. She became the three-year-old who had to close the door so no one would see her father like that. So, of course, she had to repress that action, too.”

“And if she's lucky, maybe she'll never remember,” Charlie said, and started to drive.

TWENTY

Rain was pouring down
when Charlie and Constance finished dinner and stood in the doorway contemplating the block between them and their Buick.

“An umbrella's in the car,” she said morosely. A gust of wind drove rain their way.

“You want to wait while I get the car and come around for you?”

“I think I'd get wet just standing here,” she said, drawing her coat collar up. “Let's do it.”

They ran to the corner and turned, then Charlie stopped, the rain streaming down his back and off his bare head. He gazed down the street; she realized he was looking at the back of the theater complex, at the shop and sidewalk in front of it. A streetlight on that corner seemed to dance in the driving rain. He took her arm and they walked the rest of the way to the lot where they had parked. They could not get much wetter.

There were few people out on foot, and those who were out were obscured by umbrellas. When they got in the car, the wind drove the rain hard against the windshield. Charlie started the engine, humming softly to himself.

“Aren't you freezing?” she asked, wishing the heater would warm up faster.

“Nope. Rain I can take. It's snow that gets to me. I wonder if Mrs. Shiveley knows about hot rum toddies.”

When they got to the inn, it turned out that she knew all about such things, and finally they were back in their rooms, in robes, sipping the steaming drinks and listening to the wind in the trees, the rain pelting the windows. For a long time they sat quietly, glad to be warm and dry again, until finally Charlie opened Ginnie's sketchbook and began to study the sketch Constance had ordered from her. He thought of it that way.

She had been doing the hospital scene, with Big Nurse's desk, the files, but she had drawn over everything as if she had been unaware of it. Now there was the man on the floor, a back door partially open behind him, a cabinet with a large pot of flowers before a window, through which a ray of light spilled into the room; on the other side of the door, a sink, more cabinets that turned the corner, a refrigerator. The table was wooden with matching chairs. A tablecloth had been pulled partly off the table, by the man's fall apparently. One end of it trailed on the floor in the spilled brandy. The bottle had the distinctive shape of a brandy bottle.

He turned his attention to the objects on the table. A loaf of bread, uncut, with a knife stuck in it. Not the way anyone would start to cut bread, he thought. It had been plunged deeply into the loaf. A wedge of cheese was on a plate. A wineglass had been overturned; the spilled wine? brandy? had been drawn in carefully. And that damn candle, he thought in irritation. A stub of a candle burning on another plate, or shallow bowl, a soup bowl? It didn't look like a soup bowl, or like the other plate with the cheese, either. And the candle flame was taller than the candle itself. It was on the dish surrounded with… waves? He looked closer and sighed. Waves. What the hell did that mean?

Constance was almost through reading
Troilus and Cressida
; she glanced at Charlie, but he was absorbed in the sketch and she did not interrupt him. She made a note of the page she wanted to read to him and returned to the play. When she looked up again, he was regarding her absently.

“Let me read you this one little speech,” she said. “It's Pandarus talking.” She found the passage and read: “'If ever you prove false one to another, since I have taken such pains to bring you together, let all pitiful goers-between be called to the world's end after my name; call them all Pandars; let all constant men be Troiluses, all false women Cressids, and all brokers-between Pandars!'”

“That's pretty strong stuff,” he said after she closed the book.

“It's a strong play. Full of lechery and betrayals and war weariness. It's the most cynical thing Shakespeare ever wrote, I bet.”

Charlie drained the last drops from his mug and stood up. “Speaking of lechery,” he said with an evil leer.

She laughed softly.

It was still raining the next morning when they drove out to talk to Shannon Tessler. The rain simply made everything greener than ever, but across the valley the hills and mountains had been swallowed by clouds. The small town seemed cut off from the entire world now.

“I thought you might come back,” Shannon said to Constance when she opened the door for them. She nodded at Charlie when Constance made the introductions. “Leave your umbrella in the stand,” she said, “and you can hang your coats on the tree where they can drip.” The coat tree was shaped like a rack of a mammoth buck.

“Thank you for letting us come,” Charlie said when she led them into the living room and motioned them to chairs.

“I expected another visit,” she said again.

“Yes, I guess you did. Who started the rumor that Ginnie was unstable, Mrs. Tessler?”

“Not me,” she said with a faint smile. “Is that what you're thinking? That I did it?”

“Did your husband?”

“No. He never would have thought of such a thing.”

“Were you and your husband already living here when Ro first came?”

“Yes. William had a temporary job with the Shakespearean Festival that year. We had a small orchard that was our livelihood, but he was interested in the theater and wanted to work there when he could. Then Ro came with Lucy and Vic. The first year we stayed on the orchard and he was at the beck and call of Ro so much that we never even saw him. We had to get a tenant to run everything finally and we moved to this house. A few years later we sold the orchard.”

“What were they like, Lucy, Vic, and Ro?”

“Ro was possessed, as he still is, by the theater. Lucy and Vic were like children. We were older than they were, of course. They were like children, squabbling, fighting, loving, leaving each other, running back. Like children playing at being grown-up, playing house. When they fought, she went home to Ro.”

“And then Ginnie was born. Did things change then?”

“For a time. They were children with a living doll for a time.”

“And Ro? How was he after Ginnie was born?”

She looked at Charlie, then averted her gaze and looked at the rain in her yard. “He adored her.”

“Was Lucy a good actress?”

“She was quite good.”

“ Did she ever act in the Shakespearean playhouse?”

Again she looked at him with a curious expression, as if she wanted to ask him questions. “He wouldn't let her,” she said flatly.

“But she tried? She wanted to play Shakespeare? How did he stop her?”

“I don't know. She never told me. But he stopped her, and after that… After that I think she fell in love with Vic. I think she grew up then. And Vic grew up. They were going to leave, go to

Europe, but not until the baby was born. She wanted her child born here, in the States.”

Charlie regarded her soberly for several moments. “Maybe she didn't tell you, but sometimes we don't have to be told, do we? Roman Cavanaugh came here and rearranged your life, your husband's life; he controlled his sister for years, and her husband. Is he still running everyone's life, Mrs. Tessler?”

“Of course,” she said. “He has to. He can't help himself.”

“Why don't you tell us why you wanted us to come here again,” Charlie said very gently.

When she did not respond, he said, “He started that rumor about Ginnie himself, didn't he?”

“Yes.” Her voice was low, hardly audible. “That's how he controls her. She believes she has this instability, this latent insanity. She isn't even aware of how he twists her, how subtly he makes her accept his truths that are lies. She won't let herself fall in love, swears she'll never have children of her own, that her work is all she can handle, all she wants. She's afraid. He has made her afraid to trust herself.”

“She seems to love him very honestly,” Charlie said when she stopped.

“We all loved him very honestly,” she said with great bitterness.

“And he only loved Lucy, his sister,” Charlie said.

She became rigid, then shifted in her chair as if it had become uncomfortable. “He loved no one but Lucy,” she said harshly.

“Did anyone else know?”

“I don't think so. Not William. I didn't until we moved into this house. Ro used to pass on his way to visit them. The day she drove him out, he came in here, so pale I was afraid he was having a heart attack. And all at once, I knew. That's the day I realized how blind we all were, how stupid. That's the day it ended with them, that Lucy discovered she had a husband who loved her fiercely, a child, money, everything in the world. The day she realized that she no longer needed Ro.” Abruptly she stood up. “William knows nothing of any of this. He knew there was someone I cared for, but he thought it was Vic. I let him believe that. It seemed simpler at the time. Now if you'll excuse me…”

Silently she led them to the door, watched them put on their coats and retrieve the umbrella. With her hand on the doorknob, she said, “You said he rearranged our lives. That's wrong. He took our lives. He took my husband, took my life. He takes what he wants. Please, don't come back.”

She opened the door and let them out. The door closed quietly behind them.

“Well, Christ on a mountain,” Charlie muttered, back in the Buick, not starting yet.

“That poor woman,” Constance said. “Poor Lucy. Poor Shannon.”

“Poor Ginnie,” he added. “All this surfaces because we had to find out why Ginnie was trying to close that office door, why she forgot doing it. You were right about this mess. It's a goddamn can of worms stretching back for twenty-six years. Try to look at current events and history smacks you in the face. Try looking at the past, and yesterday, last week is all you can see. I wish to hell Ginnie had left that goddamn door alone.”

He turned the key then and they drove back the winding road to the highway where he made a left turn instead of driving back to Ashland. She did not ask why, but gazed at the green countryside being drowned in the steady rain. He was scowling at the world.

They drove north to the town of Medford, twelve miles from Ashland, and he slowed down, made a turn at a shopping center. “I want to try something,” he muttered. “Let's go shopping.”

He bought a baking pan, paper plates, and candles. When they were through there, he drove to a liquor store where he bought brandy.

“I'm done,” he said then. “You want anything?”

She shook her head. “Let's go home.” For years Charlie had been on the arson squad in New York City, until fire had invaded his dreams, his life at home, his daydreams. He had started to inspect every building they entered, looking for the way out, the hazardous conditions that might lead to a holocaust. He had come awake cursing and shouting from deep sleep, fighting fire. Rags in a corner had become suspect; paper blown against a wall, suspect; faulty wiring, too many plugs in a single socket, suspect; a gas can in the sunlight… Everywhere arson was suspected, fire imminent. Finally she had forced him to admit that he had to transfer out of arson, into anything else; he had resisted at first, then agreed, and had gone into homicide.

It had helped, but it wasn't the final answer. The final answer had been his resignation after twenty-five years, his resignation, and enough time to start the healing process that had not yet been finished. She had known he had to resign when the realization hit her with shocking intensity that he no longer distinguished between criminal and victim, when everyone had become a potential murderer or arsonist in his eyes, everyone a potential victim inviting violence.

He had grown up in New York. He said that one day he had turned east instead of west, otherwise he might have been on the other side. It was that simple. She issued the ultimatum when he shot and killed a drug dealer who had gunned down a pimp, his live-in girlfriend, her two children, and a neighbor child. When Charlie received his last citation for meritorious duty, he had said coldly to the gathered media, “They were just sacrifices, all of them. We need sacrifices, don't we? The kids are better off dead.”

“We are leaving the City,” she had said. “You're retiring, and so am I. We're getting the hell out before you get killed.”

“You're off your rocker!”

“Not me. You're slipping faster and faster and I won't have it! Do you even remember that kid you were? That idealistic kid who thought an honest cop would set an example? Who thought a change here, a little change there, and the whole goddamn system would slowly turn around? Where the hell is he now, Charlie? You're pretending that kid is a casualty, dead, gone, forgotten! I don't believe it. But you don't dare remember him every day, or even once a year, or you'd break down in tears. Admit it, dammit!”

He had stormed out to get drunk, and she had sat with a pencil and notebook and worked with figures. He had walked from their Ninety-eighth Street apartment to the Village and back, and she had figured exactly how much money their two pensions would bring in, how much the royalties from her moderately successful books on popular psychology would continue to bring in, how much money they needed to finish their one daughter's education.

When he returned at three in the morning, she had met him stony-faced and exhausted. He was equally exhausted. Slowly he had nodded, and then she had wept.

And now, she thought miserably, he had that same hard look on his face that he used to get, that same bitter expression. She had known this was a bad case from the start, messy, dark, with a history of evil and meanness to plague the present, to distort the present. That damn fire, she thought. That goddamn fire!

He drove to the theater, although it was at the beginning of the lunch break. Inside, Eric Hendrickson said that Ro and Ginnie had gone out together; Gray was in his office with orders not to be disturbed. Only Juanita Margolis was around. Another superb reading, Eric said on his way out. Actually, to Charlie's eyes it appeared that a mob was in the theater—the morning cast for the reading had not yet dispersed; the cast for the afternoon read-through by the actors had started to assemble; stagehands were doing something to the overhead grid; an electrician was snaking wire through the backstage area… Anna Kaminsky's voice floated over the subdued hubbub. Before they could move away, she appeared with an angry expression.