suspicion was confirmed yesterday when Reavis’s cap was found in the grove by the pool. I knew that Reavis didn’t leave it there. He’d left it on the front seat of the car. I saw it in the car myself. I suggest that you saw it there too, and realized what could be done with it.”
“I’m not very suggestible, Mr. Slocum. But let’s assume that what you say is true. What are you going to do about it?”
“There is nothing I can do.” With his eyes turned up toward the ceiling, his hands now gripping each other, he looked like a mad saint. “In order to have you punished, I should have to trumpet my shame, my wife’s shame, to the world. You can rest easy, unless you have a conscience. Last night I did my duty to my dead mother. I told my wife what I have told you. She killed herself. It was fitting.”
Hard words rose in me. I held them back with clenched teeth. Slocum had retreated from reality. If I told him that he had driven his wife to suicide for no good reason, it would only drive him further into the unreal world.
Maude Slocum hadn’t killed herself because she murdered her mother-in-law. Her husband’s story of the cap had simply told her that Reavis hadn’t done it. Which meant that someone else had.
I said to Marvell: “If you care about this man, you’d better get him a damn good doctor.”
He batted his eyes at me, and stuttered something incoherent against his knuckles. Slocum’s face was still turned to the ceiling, wearing a sad holy smile. I went out. Form the hallway I heard him say: “It’s your move, Francis.”
I went through the house alone, thinking of Maude Slocum and looking for her daughter. The rooms and corridors were empty and still. The tide of violence running in the house had permanently ebbed and drawn the life out with it. The veranda and the loggia and the terraces were empty of life, except for the flowers burning in the fading light. I avoided the pool, which glimmered through the trees like a wicked blade. At the end of the funereal alley of cypresses I came to the old lady’s garden.
Cathy was sitting on a stone bench islanded among the lake of flowers. Her face was turned to the west, where a while before the sun had died in a glory. Her young look traveled up beyond the fieldstone wall of the garden to the mountains. She was watching their purple masses as if they formed the walls of a great prison where she had been sentenced to live alone forever.
I called to her over the gate: “Cathy. May I come in?”
She turned slowly, the mountains huge and ancient in her eyes. Her voice was flat: “Hello, Mr. Archer. Do come in.”
I released the redwood latch and stepped into the garden.
“Don’t close it,” she said. “You can leave it open.”
“What are you doing?”
“Just thinking.” She moved aside on the bench, to make room for me. The concrete surface still held the sun’s heat.
“What about?”
“Me. I used to think this was all so beautiful, and now it doesn’t mean a thing. Coleridge was right about nature, I guess. You see the beauty there if you have it in your heart. If your heart is desolate, the world is a wilderness. Did you ever read his ‘Ode to Dejection’?”
I said I never had.
“I understand it now. I’d kill myself if I had my mother’s courage. As it is, I suppose I’ll sit around and wait for something to happen to me. Something good or something bad, it doesn’t really matter.”
I didn’t know what to say. I settled for something meaningless and soothing: “All the bad things have happened, haven’t they?”
“Except the desolation in the heart.” If she hadn’t been completely earnest, the phrase would have sounded foolish.
I said: “Talk it out to me.”
“What do you mean?”
She met my gaze. For a long moment we looked at each other. Her body narrowed and shrunk, drawing away from me. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You killed your grandmother,” I said. “You might as well tell me about it.”
She bowed her head and shoulders and sat there, dry-eyed and quiet. “Does everybody know?”
“Nobody knows, Cathy. Just me and Ralph Knudson.”
“Yes. He talked to me today. Mr. Knudson is my father. Why didn’t they tell me sooner? I’d never have sent that letter.”
“Why did you send it?” I said.
“I hated my mother. She was cheating on my father—Mr. Slocum. I saw her and Mr. Knudson together one day, and I wanted to make her suffer. And I thought if my father—if Mr. Slocum found out he’d make her leave and we could be together. Don’t you see, they were always quarreling or giving each other the silent treatment. I wanted them separated so there would be some peace. But the letter didn’t seem to make any difference at all.”
For a while she had seemed a woman; more than that, an ageless sybil speaking from ancient wisdom. She had become a child again, a harried child trying to explain the inexplicable: how one could do a murder with the best intentions in the world.
“So you did it the hard way,” I said. “You thought your grandmother’s money would blow them apart. Your mother would run off with her lover, and you could live happily ever after with your father.”
“Mr. Slocum,” she corrected me. “He isn’t my father. Yes, I thought that. I am a hideous creature.” And she wailed.
A mockingbird in the cypresses took it up. The sobbing howls of the girl and the bird demented the twilight. I laid one arm across Cathy’s shuddering back. She said: “I am hideous. I should die.”
“No, Cathy. Too many people have died.”
“What are you going to do with me? I deserve to die. I really hated Grandma, I wanted to kill her. She twisted my father from the time he was a little boy, she made him what he is. You know what an Oedipus complex is, don’t you?”
“Yes. I’ve also heard of an Electra complex.”
She missed that. It was just as well, because I shouldn’t have said it. She knew too much already, more than she could bear.
She had given over crying, but the bird still howled from the tree like a disembodied conscience.
I said: “Cathy. I’m not going to do anything to you. I haven’t the right.”
“Don’t be nice to me. I don’t deserve anything nice from anybody. From the moment I decided to do it, I’ve felt as if I was cut off from every human being. I know what they mean by the mark of Cain, I have it.” She covered her high fair brow with her hand, as if it might actually be branded.
“I understand how you feel. I was responsible, in a way, for Pat Reavis’s death. Once I killed another man with my hands. I did it to save my own life, but his blood is on my hands.”
“You are being too good to me, and so was Mr. Knudson. My father.” The word sounded remarkable from her lips, as if it stood for something great and mysterious and new. “He blamed himself for everything that happened. Now you’re blaming yourself. I’m the one that did it, though. I even intended Pat to take the blame for me. I did see him here that night. I lied to you when I told you that I didn’t. He wanted me to run away with him, and I tried to want to, but I couldn’t. He was drunk; I sent him away. Then I decided I could do it. It was terrible. Once I saw what I could do, I felt as if I had to do it. You know?”
“I think I know.”
“I felt as if I’d sold my soul to the devil, even before it happened—No, I mustn’t say it
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, you couldn’t help it. What could you have done with me? Anyway, you left me there. I knew Grandma was sitting here in the garden. I couldn’t go back into the house until it was done. I went down by the pool and hid Pat’s cap in the hedge, then I called her. I told her there was a dead bird in the pool. She came to look and I pushed her in. I went into the house and went to bed. I didn’t sleep all night, or last night either. Do you think
