Wax Apple (22 page)

I continued to stare at the two of them, baffled by Rose’s manner. She was so belligerent, so angry, so determined that there should be no question about Walter Stoddard’s guilt, and yet at the same time she kept challenging me to call in the police. Was she guilty, and defiant until the end? Was she afraid Molly was guilty? But in either case, her own guilt or her fear or suspicion of Molly’s guilt, I should think she’d want to sit pat until she found out for sure whether or not I really knew as much as I claimed. If she were guilty she would have to know she
had
sent me the note, and how could she be sure I was lying about any other part of it? Unless there was some way for her to be absolutely sure I was bluffing, it made no sense for her to be the guilty one and at the same time challenging me. And how could she be sure?

“Mr. Tobin?”

Startled, I looked around, and saw everyone looking at me. The voice had been George Bartholomew’s, and now I realized he’d been asking me a question, but I had no idea what the question was. I turned to him and said, “I’m sorry, my mind was wandering. Would you repeat that, please?”

“I said, it seems to me if the guilty person was going to confess, they would have done it when Walter was led away. Once they decided to let somebody else pay for their crimes, I should think they’d be hardened to the kind of appeal you’re trying to make. Don’t you think so?”

I was afraid he was right, and said so, adding, “I was just hoping for the best. I thought, in this situation, in the therapy session here, the guilty one might realize the truth was the best thing after all.”

Marilyn Nazarro said, “Mr. Tobin,
are
you telling the truth?” She was sitting next to Rose Ackerson, who was devoting all her attention now to Molly, and in a way Marilyn had picked up Rose’s fallen standard, except that she was carrying it in a far quieter and more civilized way.

I told her, “I
did
get a note from the guilty person, who
is
one of the people in this room. I’ll tell you that for a fact, I’ll swear to it, and Doctor Fredericks will tell you I’m telling the truth. I don’t want to say any more than that.”

They all turned to look at Fredericks, who said, “It’s true enough. Mr. Tobin just told you the true facts. I hadn’t thought he was going to bring them out in the open like this, I’m not sure it was the wisest thing to do, but it is the truth.”

Donald Walburn abruptly muttered, “They’ll stick together, Marilyn, don’t believe either of them. When you find people sticking together, they’re always up to something to get somebody else. Believe me, I know.”

I didn’t want us to get back into a discussion of Donald Walburn’s paranoia again, and luckily neither did Doctor Fredericks, who said, “Marilyn, what made you accept Walter’s confession at face value?”

She was surprised by the question, but no one else filled the silence she left, so after half a minute she said, “I don’t know. I suppose I just took it for granted.”

“Because the police believed him.”

“Yes, of course.”

“But the police don’t know Walter, and we do. Shouldn’t our opinion supersede that of the police?”

Beth Tracy said, “But they’re specialists, aren’t they? I mean, just like you’re a specialist, so we believe you when you talk about psychiatry and things like that.”

The conversation spiraled slowly from that point, Fredericks and Beth and Marilyn turning the question of belief and knowledge and specialism around and around, and I settled back to think things out. I looked at the faces around me and compared them with the attitudes they’d been showing, compared the attitudes with the reality of the situation and the kind of crimes we’d been dealing with, and found myself slowly sinking into a morass of possible motivations and unlikely exposure methods, and just as I was about to give up in disgust I saw a glimmer of light. I saw a possible answer to a secondary question, and that led me to another answer, and then another answer, and all at once I saw the thing neat and clean and clear.

Now all that was left was to prove it.

T
HE HOUR WAS NEARING
its end, and nothing more of any value had happened. I’d bided my time, waiting for the right opportunity, and it came at last as a result of something Bob Gale said.

It was a speech he made, actually, a brief but impassioned speech about protecting ourselves, protecting our pride and self-respect from the ugly bluntness of the local police. This led directly to a split down the middle of the group, between those who agreed with Bob’s estimation of the police, and those who thought the police excellent specialists who could be relied upon to do their job well, regardless of an occasional incident like the beating up of O’Hara and Merrivale—and hadn’t O’Hara and Merrivale brought that on themselves in the first place? Bob and Beth Tracy and George Bartholomew were all on the side of believing the local police inefficient and brutal. Donald Walburn and Rose Ackerson and Marilyn Nazarro were of the opinion, in differing ways and for differing reasons, that the police were basically good and efficient. The debate waxed hot for a while, and both Fredericks and I let it go, since impassioned people sometimes say more than they intend. But when I judged the peak of the argument had been passed I took the first handy pause in which to say, “We haven’t heard from Molly yet. What do you think of the police, Molly?”

She responded to her name by looking at me, but she didn’t respond to the question at all. Her expression was mostly blank, with vague worry overlapping it like a thin cloud layer.

I said, “What do you think, Molly?”

Rose Ackerson said, “Leave her alone. She doesn’t feel like talking today.”

“But you were doing so well the other day, Molly,” I said. “You’d decided you weren’t going to take any more cruelty from anybody, remember? You were going to fight back at last. No more overeating, no more self-pity, you were going to fight back. Remember saying that?”

The look of worry was growing less vague. “I don’t want to talk today,” she said. Her voice was frailer, more childlike, than it had been before.

“I can understand that, Molly,” I said. “Maybe you can get Rose to write a note for you, if you don’t feel like doing your own talking.”

Rose snapped, “What are you trying to do? We’re in front of witnesses, you know, there is such a thing as libel. You’d better be careful what you say.”

I looked at Rose, and said, “You kept challenging me to prove that I knew who the guilty one was, and that confused me. Unless you could be completely sure I was bluffing, you couldn’t be guilty and want to challenge me. And how could you be completely sure I was bluffing?”

“Just from looking at you,” she said, angry and sneering. “A man who’s been a failure and a four-flusher at everything all his life, what else would you know how to do but bluff?”

“That’s a good reason,” I said, “but not good enough to make you completely sure of yourself. But I suddenly remembered something I’d said, about one person out of the seven in this room being guilty, and then I realized what the truth had to be.”

She pointed a trembling finger at me, trembling not from fear but from barely restrained rage. “I’ve warned you about libel. I’m not going to warn you again.”

“The truth,” I insisted, “is that
two
people were guilty, and if I didn’t know that, obviously I didn’t know anything. That table that collapsed on you two was
not
a rigged accident. It was the first of the accidents, and it caused the others, but it was not—”

“I’ll have you in jail!” Rose shrieked. She was on her feet, and if Molly hadn’t been sitting there helpless, Rose would have stalked from the room. But she couldn’t leave Molly behind. “You can’t
say
these terrible things!”

“I can and I will. When that table collapsed on you two and everybody laughed, you both hated them. Molly hated everybody here, because they had laughed, and they became for her everybody in her whole life who had ever laughed at her and got away with it. And you hated them for what they’d done to Molly. Not because they laughed at you, you’re too strong and self-sufficient to be affected by something like that, but because they laughed at
Molly.
”

“I suppose you and Walter Stoddard have some sort of homosexual relationship,” she said, trying now to switch to the haughtily superior. “It shouldn’t be hard for the police to get to the bottom of all this.”

“No, it shouldn’t. I know Molly insisted on that note to me when I broke my arm, because after all I hadn’t been here when everybody laughed, I wasn’t one of the laughers and therefore I shouldn’t be punished, and I know you wrote the note, just as I know she insisted on the note about Walter Stoddard being innocent and you wrote that one, but other than that I don’t know which of you is responsible for what. I don’t know which of you first suggested that you give other people accidents and see how they’d laugh about
that,
but it doesn’t really matter, does it? You did it all together, one doing the sabotage and the other standing watch. As Donald Walburn said, when people stick together they’re up to something. And what you two were up to was paying the whole world back for the lifetime of indignities Molly had suffered.”

“Who would believe such foolishness?” she demanded, but as she looked angrily around the table I saw her face change. I didn’t look away from her, but I could guess the expressions she was seeing on the faces around her, and they wouldn’t be encouraging, because this
was
the truth, and it had the feel of truth at last, and people can tell when things have the feel of truth.

I said, “Molly.”

“Leave her alone!”

Fredericks said, in a voice so shockingly soft it was worse than any yell, “Rose, sit down. Be quiet.”

“Molly,” I said.

She looked at me, reluctant, wary, childlike.

I said, “Molly, Frank DeWitt never laughed at you.”

Rose was saying nothing now, but she was still on her feet, and she closed a hand tight on Molly’s shoulder. I saw the touch stiffen Molly, and she slowly shook her head and said, “We didn’t do any of it. We wouldn’t do things like that.”

I didn’t know what to say next, how to reach her, and while I was still trying to think, George Bartholomew said, “Molly, I never laughed at you. Don’t you remember? When that table went over, I was right at the next table, and I jumped right up and brushed that coffee off your lap with my napkin. Don’t you remember that? I never laughed at you, Molly, and look.” His hand, a thin hand with rabbity movements, went up to touch his cheek. “Look what you did to my face,” he said.

“Oh,” Molly said, more a groan than a word, and her face crumpled, and she dropped her head forward onto folded arms. Her shoulders looked huge, and they shook with sobs, and through the crying, muffled by her arms, we still could hear what she was saying, over and over:

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

W
EDNESDAY, THE SECOND
of July. No humidity, no rain, no hovering clouds, only a high beautiful blue sky, a warm sun and a pleasant breeze. I was alone in the house, having called Kate when I’d come home from Kendrick last Friday and told her that she and Bill should stay at least a full month out there on Long Island. Of course I’d be all right, I told her, and she finally agreed.

Yesterday the doctor gave me a smaller cast, leaving both my elbow and wrist free, so that now I could keep my arm in a sling and ever wear normal clothing instead of being limited to pajama tops. The itching was still fierce, but that was supposed to be a good sign. At least, they said it was.

The explanations with Captain Yoncker had lasted most of last Thursday afternoon and evening, so I hadn’t been able to leave until the afternoon train on Friday. But they’d taken an affidavit from me, which would do in lieu of my presence at the inquest, and when I did leave Kendrick it was for good.

Rose had gone on denying the truth for nearly an hour after Molly’d broken down, and then she too confessed. Each woman tried to claim the lion’s share of the blame for herself, but the official attitude was to apportion it evenly. Both would wind up back in asylums, probably for good.

The house had been fine to come home to, silent and restful after the pain and suffering of The Midway, but hampered by my bad arm I’d been unable to do much of anything and I’d been getting restless and edgy. I half-wanted to call Kate and ask her to come in for a day or two, but I knew she would react by calling off the vacation entirely, so I stayed away from the phone. I watched television, read, and had obscure uncomfortable dreams about the residents of The Midway, people who were fading more quickly from my waking mind than my sleeping mind. The weather was changeable all weekend, and then on Tuesday I got the smaller cast, and Wednesday was a beautiful day, and I stood on the back porch looking at my wall.

I hadn’t worked on it for quite a while. It would fill the time, the way it always did, but here was my blasted right arm, useless. I didn’t dare try to work with it, that would only delay the time when it would be healed and useful again.

One-handed? I looked out at the wall, inching up out of the ground all the way around my back yard, ten inches wide, an unbroken line for three sides, with the house forming the fourth wall. I wouldn’t be able to dig one-handed, of course, but what about laying bricks? It would be slower, but I cared nothing about speed, I had no deadlines to meet. All I had to do was one step at a time, all left-handed. It was at least worth a try.

And it worked. I got into old clothes and went out in the yard and the only difficult part really was preparing the mortar, but once that was done the rest was almost easy. Pick up the trowel, put down the trowel. Pick up a brick, put down the brick. Pick up the trowel, put down the trowel. Pick up a brick, put down the brick. The sun was warm, the air was fresh, the bricks were a beautiful color in the sunlight.

I’d sleep without dreams tonight.

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