`Mrs. Harley made a good deal of sense. Harley didn't.'
`I'm not surprised. He's a pretty good farmer, they say, but he's been in and out of the mental hospital. I took - my wife and I took care of his son Mike during one of his bouts. We took him into our home.'
He sounded ashamed of the act.
`That was a generous thing to do.'
`I'm afraid it was misguided generosity. But who can prophesy the future? Anyway, it's over now. All over.'
He forgot about me completely for a moment, then came to himself with a start. 'Come in, Mr. Archer. My wife will want to talk to you.'
He took me into the living room. It had group and family photos on the walls, and a claustrophobic wallpaper, which lent it some of the stuffiness of an old-fashioned country parlor. The room was sedately furnished with well- cared-for maple pieces. Across the mantel marched a phalanx of sports trophies gleaming gold and silver in the harsh overhead light.
Mrs. Brown was sitting in an armchair under the light. She was a strikingly handsome woman a few years younger than her husband, maybe fifty-five. She had chosen to disguise herself in a stiff and rather dowdy black dress. Her too precisely marcelled brown hair had specks of gray in it. Her fine eyes were confused, and surrounded by dark patches. When she gave me her hand, the gesture seemed less like a greeting than a bid for help.
She made me sit down on a footstool near her. `Tell us all about poor Carol, Mr. Archer.'
All about Carol. I glanced around the safe, middle-class room, with the pictures of Carol's ancestors on the walls, and back at her parents' living faces. Where did Carol come in? I could see the source of her beauty in her mother's un-disguisable good looks. But I couldn't see how one life led to the other, or why Carol's life had ended as it had.
Brown said: `We know she's dead, murdered, and that Mike probably did it, and that's about all.'
His face was like a Roman general's, a late Roman general's, after a long series of defeats by barbarian hordes.
`It's about all I know. Mike seems to have been using her as a decoy in an extortion attempt. You know about the Hillman boy?'
He nodded. `I read about it before I knew that my daughter-' His voice receded.
`They say he may be dead, too,' his wife said.
`He may be, Mrs. Brown.'
`And Mike did these things? I knew he was far gone, but I didn't know he was a monster.'
`He's not a monster,' Brown said wearily. `He's a sick man. His father was a sick man. He still is, after all the mental hospital could do for him.'
`If Mike was so sick, why did you bring him into this house and expose your daughter to him?'
`She's your daughter, too.'
`I know that. I'm not allowed to forget it. But I'm not the one that ruined her for life.'
`You certainly had a hand in it. You were the one, for instance, who encouraged her to enter that beauty contest.'
`She didn't win, did she?'
`That was the trouble.'
`Was it? The trouble was the way you felt about that Harley boy.'
`I wanted to help him. He needed help, and he had talent.'
`Talent?'
`As an athlete. I thought I could develop him.'
`You developed him all right.'
They were talking across me, not really oblivious of me, using me as a fulcrum for leverage, or a kind of stand-in for reality. I guessed that the argument had been going on for twenty years.
`I wanted a son,' Brown said.
`Well, you got a son. A fine upstanding son.'
He looked as if he was about to strike her. He didn't, though. He turned to me: `Forgive us. We shouldn't do this. It's embarrassing.'
His wife stared at him in unforgiving silence. I tried to think of something that would break or at least soften the tension between them: `I didn't come here to start a quarrel.'
`You didn't start it, let me assure you.'
Brown snickered remorsefully. `It started the day Carol ran off with Mike. It was something I didn't foresee-' His wife's bitter voice cut in: `It started when she was born, Rob. You wanted a son. You didn't want a daughter. You rejected her and you rejected me.'
`I did nothing of the sort.'
`He doesn't remember,' she said to me. `He has one of these convenient memories that men have. You blot out anything that doesn't suit your upright idea of yourself. My husband is a very dishonest man.'
She had a peculiar angry gnawing smile.
