'I won't use this unless he forces me to. I have to protect myself.'
'What will become of the children?'
'That will be pretty much up to you.'
'Why should it be up to me?' she said in her little-girl voice. 'Why did this have to happen to me?'
You married the wrong man at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, I told her silently. But there was no use saying it out loud. She already knew it. In fact she had been telling me about it, in her own queer inarticulate way, ever since I met her.
'At least you've survived. That's something to be thankful for, Bess.'
She raised her fist in an impatient, almost threatening, gesture. 'I don't want to survive, not this way.'
'You might as well. The life you live may be your own.'
The prospect frightened her. 'Don't leave me by myself.'
'I have to. Why don't you call one of your friends?'
'We don't have any. They dropped away long ago.'
She seemed to be lost in her own house. I tried to kiss her goodbye. It wasn't a good idea. Her mouth was unresponsive, her body as stiff as a board.
The thought of her stayed with me, poignant and unsatisfying, as I drove across town toward the Fablon house. Perhaps below the level of consciousness, down where the luminous monsters swam in their cold darkness, Bess was in love with her husband's love affair.
Ginny was at home, and he was with her. His gray Fiat stood under the oak tree. When I knocked on the front door, they answered it together. He was red-eyed and sallow. She was shivering.
'Maybe you can make him stop talking,' she said. 'He's been talking for hours and hours.'
'What about?'
'I forbid you to say.'
Tappinger's voice was hoarse and unnatural. 'Go away,' he said to me.
'Please don't,' she said. 'I'm afraid of him. He killed Roy and the others. That's what he's been talking about all day all the reasons why he had to kill Roy. And he keeps giving different reasons, like he saw Roy kneeling by the pool trying to wash his bloody face and he felt so sorry for him that he pushed him in. That's the euthanasia reason. Then there's the St.-George-and-the-dragon reason: Roy was delivering me into the hands of Mr. Ketchel and something had to be done to stop Her voice was savage and scornful. Tappinger winced under it. 'You mustn't make fun of me.'
'This is making fun?'
She turned to me. 'The real reason was very simple. You guessed it last night. I'd been pregnant by him and Roy found out somehow that Taps was the father.'
'You let me think it was Peter.'
'I know I did. I'm not covering up for Taps any longer.'
He gasped as if he had been holding his breath. 'You mustn't talk like that. Someone might hear you. Why don't we go inside?'
'I like it here.' She planted herself more firmly in the doorway. He was afraid to leave her. He had to hear what she might say.
'What were you doing at the Tennis Club that night, professor?'
His eyes veered and then held steady. 'I went there for purely professional reasons. Miss Fablon had been my student since February. I counseled her, and she confided in me.'
'Did I not,' she said.
He went on spinning out his string of words, as if it was his only support in a void: 'She confided that her father, with the aid of a scholarship from Mr. Ketchel, was going to send her to a school in Switzerland. I felt that my advice as an educator would be useful to them, and I went to the club to offer it.
'I got there rather too late to be of use. I saw Mr. Fablon staggering across the lawn, and when I spoke to him he didn't know me. He stumbled into the pool enclosure, apparently with some idea of washing his face, which was bleeding, and before I knew it he had fallen in. I'm not a swimmer myself, but I tried to fish him out with a pole they keep for that purpose, with a paddle hook on the end ' 'You mean,' she said, 'you used it to hold him under water.'
'That's a ridiculous accusation. Why do you keep repeating it?'
'Francis gave me an eyewitness account the other night. I didn't believe him then - I thought he was making it up out of jealousy. But I believe him now. He saw you push Roy in and hold him under with the pole.'
'Why didn't he interfere if he was there?'
Tappinger said pedantically. 'Why didn't he report it?'
'I don't know.'
She peered up past me at the declining sun, as if it might abandon her, leave her in cold darkness. 'There are a lot of things I don't understand.'
'Did you take them up with your mother Monday night?' I said.
'Some of them. I asked her if it could be true that Taps drowned Roy in the swimming pool. I shouldn't have, I suppose. The idea seemed to throw her.'
'I know it did. I talked to her after you left. And after that she talked to Tappinger on the phone. That was her last talk. He came here and shot her.'
He said without conviction: 'I did not.'
'Yes you did, Taps.'
Her voice was grave. 'You killed her, and then the next day you came to Brentwood and killed Francis.'
'But I had no reason to kill either of them.'
There was a questioning note in his denial.
'You had plenty of reasons.'
'What were they?' I said to both of them.
They turned and looked at each other as if each felt the other possessed the answer, the multiple answer. I was struck by the curious resemblance between them, in spite of their differences in sex and age. They were very nearly the same height and weight, and they had the same fine regular features. They could have been brother and sister. I wished they had been.
'What were the reasons for killing Martel?' I said.
They went on looking into each other's faces, as if each were a dream figure in the other's dream which had to be interpreted.
'You were jealous of Francis, weren't you?' Ginny finally said.
'That's nonsensical.'
'Then you're nonsensical, because you're the one who said it in the first place. You wanted me to call the whole thing off:' I said: 'What whole thing was that?'
Neither of them spoke. They looked at me with a kind of dimly comprehended shame, like children caught in forbidden play. I said: 'You were going to kill him and inherit his money, weren't you? But it's always the con artist who gets conned. You were so full of your own wild dreams that you believed his stories. You didn't know or care that his money was embezzled from an income-tax evader.'
'That's not true,' Ginny said. 'Francis told me the whole story of his life last weekend. It's true he started out as a poor boy in Panama. But he was a direct descendant of Sir Francis Drake through his mother, and he had a parchment map, which was handed down in the family, showing the location of Drake's buried treasure. Francis found the treasure, over a million dollars' worth of Peruvian gold, on the coast of Panama near Nombre de Dios.'
I didn't argue with her. It no longer mattered what she believed, or said that she believed.
'And it isn't true,' she went on, 'that we planned to kill him, or anybody. The original plan was for me to marry Peter. I was simply to divorce him and get a settlement, so that Taps and I could go away ' He shook his head at her in quick short arcs. His hair frizzed out like a woman's.
'Go away and study in Europe?' I said.
'Yes. Taps thought if he could get back to France that he could write his book. He'd been trying to get it started for years. I was getting desperate, too. It got so shabby, making love in the backs of cars, or in his office, or in a public motel. Sometimes I felt as if everyone on the campus, everyone in town, must know about us. But
