The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed (3 page)

That was the depression in Sherman. During the war boys in khaki staggered in the street and fought in the alley; afterward they loafed around wearing ruptured ducks and pieces of old uniforms. When their unemployment payments ran out, they drifted to Kansas City to pack meat or to California to build airplanes. Sometimes when their parents die they come back and try to farm the old place, but they usually sell out and Lou has another listing.

That night I asked Lou over supper: “Sell anything?”

“Umm … not yet.”

Lou had a private rule never to discuss a transaction until it was finished, the deed signed and the money deposited. There was no point in trying to discuss Curt with him even if I’d wanted to; he’d have turned cagey and talked around the subject. When it comes to business, Lou seems to forget I’m his wife.

But the next day I knew the deal had gone through and that Cart Friedland was settling in Sherman. His wife came into the store just before noon. I knew it had to be her; we don’t get two unrelated strangers in a single week. She wore no makeup. Her short, thick-curled hair spilled from the front of her white woolen cap like glossy purple grapes. Her tanned face was narrow; her eyes large and hazel, with an element of softness. They made her look surprised and bewildered, and I wanted to help her.

But I didn’t. I watched her push her cart around the store picking up the things you need to restock a house: condiments, spices, flour and canned staples. She wore a preoccupied, totally introverted air, as though unaware that she had the attention of everyone in the store. The bread man had dropped two loaves trying to stack bread and watch her at the same time; the candy man had broken off his discussion with me and was peering over the shelves at her. She wore a hip-length mink jacket and tight toreador pants which revealed the abrupt beginning curve of her buttocks below the jacket. She wore the fur as though it were something to keep her warm; a combination of the elegant and shoddy (her ski boots, for example, were scuffed and muddy) made her look as though she’d grown up in wealth and no longer noticed it.

Gladys Schmit must have been watching the store; she came in five minutes later and examined the shelves of pickles. Gladys didn’t eat pickles, but that’s where Curt’s wife was. I heard Gladys ask: “Aren’t you Curtis Friedland’s wife?”

The girl paused as though thinking it over, then said: “Yes. I’m Gabrielle.”

Gladys launched her schoolmarm’s interrogation about Gabrielle’s career, her husband, and her plans. Gabrielle dodged none of the questions, but answered them in a way which told Gladys only what she knew already: that they’d sold their business in Chicago, spent a few months in the Caribbean, then come here. Gladys attempted to trade confidences; she told about having Curt in school, and how intelligent he was …

“… But so shy and unsure of himself. I used to tell him, go ahead, don’t doubt yourself, but he never …”

The girl was not interested. Having defined the old woman’s relationship to her husband and decided there was nothing she wanted, she answered in polite monosyllables until Gladys ran down and departed. Then she wheeled her cart to the counter and said to me:

“It seemed like she was talking about someone else. He isn’t like that.”

She’d done nothing to me except marry into the Friedlands, but I’m really not an outgoing type; I’m narrow and suspicious and mean-tempered, like most Brushcreekers. I busied myself in ringing up her purchases. “People change,” I said.

She gave a vague lost smile. “They don’t, really.”

I ripped off the long ribbon of tape and laid it before her. While I was boxing her purchases, the guilt crept in. After all, she was a stranger in our xenophobic little village and it was pointless to be rude to her. I told her who I was and asked if she’d like to visit some afternoon.

She laid a fifty-dollar bill on the counter and gave me an unblinking look: “Does this include Curt?”

So … she wouldn’t let me off the book. I slightly admired her honesty. “I saw him earlier. Didn’t he tell you?”

“Yes. He said you’d changed. You used to be friends.”

My face felt hot. “It was a long time ago.”

“Yesterday,” she said. “It all happened yesterday.”

I frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve got a man,” she said, “who had it all in his hands. Success. Then he threw it away. Why? Because he skipped a turn. He says life is a downhill slalom and if you miss a run the rest of the run doesn’t count. No matter how good it is. He thinks he could have saved Frankie if he’d been here, but the air force doesn’t give emergency furloughs for murder trials.”

I was shocked at the change in her. Instead of a lost, bewildered girl, I was suddenly faced by a passionate, self-assured woman; eyes blazing, coat thrown back and hands on hips, small breasts thrust against a white cashmere sweater. She had a raw physical appeal, a certain savage sexuality which I’d missed the first time.

I lowered my eyes and started counting out her change. “You think Frankie’s innocent?”

“I don’t question my husband’s convictions.”

“And he thinks so?”

“Curt doesn’t question Frankie’s word.” She smiled and put the change in her purse. “We all have our little dogmas, don’t we?”

I knew what she meant, and I wanted to tell her that I’d wondered about Frankie’s guilt—even doubted it—but that I was neither detective nor lawyer … and no matter what happened Anne would remain in her grave …

But I said nothing, and she turned and walked away. I started to call that she’d left her groceries when I saw her speak to a man who’d been leaning against the building. He came in and I saw that it was Guilford Sisk, about six-feet-four of good-natured male with bony wrists hanging from the sleeves of a red and black Mackinaw. He wore his woolen cap pushed off his forehead so the earflaps rested on his ears. He grinned at me self-consciously and jerked his head toward the groceries.

“Those belong to Missus Friedland?”

I nodded. “Are you working for her, Gil?”

“That wouldn’t be work,” he said with a wink. “No, working for Curt, helping him fix up the old house. It’s pretty shot.”

That puzzled me, because Gil wasn’t one of the men who generally hired out his labor. On the contrary, Gil was one of the biggest landowners in the county. His great-grandfather had come out from Ohio with a Union Army land grant for most of the choice bottomland around Sherman. Gil’s grandfather had gradually acquired the rest of it, and there was nothing for their descendants to do but enjoy themselves while the land increased in value. Gil was the last remaining member of the family He hadn’t married; he told me once that he was only interested in one woman and that was me. Yet he’d never proposed in a way that I could take seriously. I enjoyed talking to him because he was intelligent and well-educated; now and then he’d bring up something I’d never heard of, then he’d explain it—not with exasperated patience, as though he were instructing a child, as Lou often did—but with enthusiasm, as though he was as interested in it as I was. I sometimes got the feeling that Gil and I were expatriates in a foreign land, forced together because we could talk only among ourselves. Lou was intelligent too, but he didn’t get along with Gil. Our home place was surrounded by Gil’s land; Lou wanted to branch out and Gil wouldn’t sell. That could have been the reason for the coolness between them, or it could have been me. Gil had never made a pass at me which I could definitely identify, and I had never given him any openings. (I don’t think a woman ever gets an offer she doesn’t invite, unless it’s from a boob, a stranger, a nut who’s showing off for friends, or a drunk. No reasonably intelligent man is going to approach a woman without encouragement, and I’d never given it to Gil.) It’s true that he had a bad reputation … he’d grown up with fast cars and girls who never said no. Even now he had no respect for the institution of marriage. “A married man’s got to uphold the sacred bond of matrimony,” he told me once. “He doesn’t want someone plowing his own field while he’s plowing another’s. Me, what have I got to lose?” But if there’d been a spark waiting to flame up we’d both have known it by now. Nothing could sneak up and surprise us; we’d talked too long and too frankly. He didn’t need me, anyway; when he wanted that kind of amusement he’d go down to Kaycee or up to Chicago and bring back a girl to stay a few weeks in his huge three-story brick mansion. He didn’t live there, he merely camped in one or the other of its thirty-eight rooms. When he got tired of the woman he sent her home, then plunged into an orgy of work. You’d see him out working on his land, digging post holes, pitching hay and cutting wood, no different than any of his farm hands. He was a strange and rootless man, and despite all our profound conversations, I had the feeling I’d only skated on the surface of his character.

I watched him shoulder the box and I asked: “What’s your game now, Gil?”

“With her?” He shook his head soberly. “No game. The kid doesn’t know how to play.” He stuck a cigaret in his mouth and struck a kitchen match on his thumb. He was full of such overdone yokel mannerisms. “Neither one of them knows how to play, Velda. You might keep that in mind when you’re around Curt.”

My face grew warm, but I didn’t rise to his bait. “Well … what are they doing here?” He shrugged. “We’ll see, Velda. Be patient.”

I watched him walk out, and then it struck me. Gil had been Frankie Friedland’s best friend. He’d also known Anne not in a romantic sense, but as a member of her group.

And he’d been unable to prove where he was the night Anne was killed.

I felt as though a dismal fog were settling slowly over the community. I didn’t want to think about it. I started unpacking soup cans and stacking them in a pyramid.

I was still at it when Ethel reported for work. She was a small erect woman with a hyperthyroid bulge in her eyes. Her husband had once owned the store, but his car had stalled on a rural railroad crossing and he hadn’t gotten out in time. She’d sold the store to Louis, but then she’d found time heavy on her hands and come to work for me. Usually she relieved me at one and closed up at six, but today she had something to tell me which wouldn’t wait. She’d spent the morning with a sister who worked in the traffic bureau in the county seat of Franklin. The sister had a friend in charge of circuit court records, and guess who had come in that morning and bought a transcript of the Friedland trial….

“Curt Friedland,” I said.

Ethel blinked at me, her eyes magnified by thick-lensed spectacles. “How’d you know?”

“The town is in suspended animation. Nothing moves, only Curt Friedland.”

“Well …” Ethel’s tone was deflated. “He also asked for the coroner’s report on Bernice Struble, but that wasn’t available. You know what they say?”

“Who says?” I asked.

A wave of her hand included the entire community. “They say he’s trying to clear his brother.”

I looked up at Ethel, suddenly hating the community for its inability to mind its own business.

“Who says, Ethel?”

“Everybody. And you know what else they say?”

“For God’s sake, don’t dribble it out.
Say it!”

The pyramid collapsed, and I walked off and left the cans rolling. As I opened the door to my cubbyhole office, she called after me: “They say Bernice was probably murdered!”

I slammed the door and lit a cigaret. I tried to work on the charge account ledger, but I couldn’t get interested in who owed us money. We had enough money already. I pulled on my cloth coat and walked out. I said good-by to Ethel but she didn’t answer. Well, she’d survive the blow.

Driving east in the station wagon, I found myself humming a song under my breath:
Oh-oh, trouble’s back in town.
I could only remember one line, but it seemed to fit….

I drove north on the gravel, then turned right and passed beneath a stone archway. The open wrought-iron gates—initialed LB for Louis Bayrd—made me feel as though I were entering a cemetery. I drove up the curving lane which Lou had paved and bordered with evergreens. He’d made his aunt’s old farm look like a country estate; white fences enclosed sloping pastures; chunky Herefords grazed amid a shrinking patchwork of snow; a sorrel mare and a black gelding trotted with the car along an old-fashioned rail fence. Towering elms and red oaks flanked a white neocolonial house and a five-acre lawn sloped down to a pint-sized lake stocked with swans and bluegills. Lou had put up a diving board and planted shrubbery, then had grumbled because Sharon and I didn’t use it more. So we’d used it fiercely for a month and Lou had happily gone on to something else: converted the old farmhouse into a workshop, jammed it to the roof with power tools and built a power cruiser. Now the boat squatted on its trailer gathering dust, waiting for summer and sunshine on Lake Pillybay. We’d probably use it two or three times. When did Lou enjoy himself? What drove him? I couldn’t answer because he never sat still long enough for me to see him.

The kitchen was polished brick and sparkling copper. I washed the breakfast dishes, opened a can of pork and beans and ate, washing it down with milk. I brewed coffee and drank it with a slow cigaret, feeling the silence of the huge empty house seep into my body. I liked the lonely afternoons at home. Evenings there was Lou, mornings the store, but in the afternoons I led my own life.

I washed the dishes and debated whether to take a bath or a shower. I decided against a bath; it made me lazy and sexual, like a cat licking itself in the sun. Today I needed movement. I showered under water blended to give just a tingle of coolness. I dried myself before the heating vent, letting the warm air caress my skin. I pulled on blue jeans and a sweatshirt and walked down to the pasture. I pumped water for the horses and let them nibble sugar lumps out of my palms. I noticed that the gelding had gotten fat during the cold spell. I took the hackamore off the windmill and pulled it over his head. I rode him bareback, raising my face to the wind and feeling his great muscles roll between my thighs. After a half hour I slid off and removed the hackamore. I could feet the warmth and dampness of perspiration against my thighs. I took another shower and went into the studio Lou had built for me. I pulled the drapes and filled the room with purple twilight. I sat down at the piano and played songs I knew by heart. My fingers moved without direction; my thoughts dwindled away….