Thorn

Mary wanted to protest that it was not very good at all, that she was growing frightened. But she would not be a coward. She would get her property that she had come here for, and then she would leave, if possible before the darkness thickened any further. She started up the shadowed stair. Thorn's feet, closely following, were inaudibly light.

As I was going up the stair

I met a man who wasn't there . . .

How did it go? Something like that, anyway. Actually she was quite glad for his tall, silent presence. It was not this man she feared. She hadn't realized, or had lately forgotten, that when she lived here she had felt real fear of certain other people in the house. In her imagination she could see Ellison Seabright now at the head of the stairs, as he had been standing on that night, looking down at her . . . and behind Ellison, another and truly terrifying figure that came and went before Mary knew who it was, and maybe she didn't want to know . . . even only in her imagination.

She half-stumbled near the top of the stairs, and Thorn's hand came to support her elbow neatly. 'Thank you,' Mary murmured. 'God, yes, you were right. How it all comes back . . .'

'Your bedroom,' said Thorn, interrupting a silent pause, 'must have been down this corridor, on the right.'

'Yes. But how did you know?'

Thorn was pacing slowly away, not answering. He reached a door and pushed it open, and stood in the hallway inspecting the dim interior thoughtfully.

'That wasn't mine.'

'Delaunay's.'

'How could you have known?' She came up beside Thorn; the room he was gazing into was so dark it was impossible to see anything. 'Oh, of course, some of the magazines published plans of the whole layout, didn't they? There was so much publicity. I'm glad that's finally beginning to be over.'

'What was Delaunay like?' Thorn was looking into the room as if to read its very shadows.

'Oh . . . big. Not quite as big as Ellison, and five years older, but there was a fairly strong resemblance. Physically, I mean, of course, that's all. Del was a kind old man, shy of publicity. He was always kind to me, anyway. He came here from Australia when he was very young. He still had something Aussie, as he called it, in his speech at times. He and Ellison had the same father, different mothers.'

'How was the family wealth amassed?'

'I'm not really sure. Somewhere a couple of generations back, I guess. Del built up the fortune even more during his lifetime. He never seemed to me to be the tycoon type, you know, mean, aggressive, a go-getter. But I guess things could have been different when he was young.' Mary seemed about to add something but then decided against it. Thorn thought that for once her mouth closed prematurely.

'What?' he prompted.

'I . . . well, I shouldn't say it. But sometimes I wondered about him.'

'Oh? In what way?'

'Well . . . just that I didn't think he could have been as nice to everyone as he was to me. He was just a little bit too good. Oh, that's a rotten thing for me to say after he was so generous to me and all. But you know what I mean?'

Thorn nodded encouragingly. 'Perhaps I do.'

Once over the hump, Mary plunged on. 'Look, I've known one or two people, in religious orders, who I thought were really saintly. It's not all that common there, believe me. But there were one or two who I wouldn't be surprised if they were canonized someday. They were really good. They had a, a kind of joy about them. Well, I never felt like that about Del. He went through all the motions of being very good, with me at least, playing the role of this extremely nice old man. But . . .' Mary, with a helpless gesture, despaired of saying it just right.

'But,' supplied Thorn, 'he could have been acting.'

Mary sighed and moved away from Del's room, going down the corridor, her steps picking up briskness as she went. 'It's wrong of me to talk like that. He really gave me that Verrocchio.'

'Did he, indeed? Then where is it?'

But Mary had been distracted. Halfway to her old room, walking the thickly padded, silent carpet, her steps moved irregularly to one side, as if in some involuntary reaction.

Thorn took her again by the elbow, gently stopping her forward progress. 'Where did you find the murdered girl?'

Mary had backed up against the wall and was staring at the floor just in front of her feet. Now her voice was a mere whisper. 'Her legs were stretched out in this direction. Like she had been running, and then was shot from behind, and just fell forward, you know? But she must have been turning her head to look behind her just as she was shot, because her face caught it. The whole front part of her head was . . . I couldn't have identified her face, no one could. But otherwise it looked like Helen. She had on a white robe of Helen's, and there weren't any other young girls around. At least not as far as I knew.'

'Annie Chapman?'

Mary tried to read Thorn's eyes; he had taken off his sunglasses at last, but the dim light made it hard. She said: 'That's the name that . . . the girl on the phone mentioned. I swear to you I never heard of any Annie Chapman, not until we got that crazy call. I've been racking my brain trying to remember, and the name means nothing. But since then I've been thinking . . .'

'Yes?'

'Well, maybe Delaunay wasn't as good, as perfect, as he let on to me. And I know he was involved with trying to help runaways; or he told me he wanted to get involved with it anyway—'

'What are you trying to say, Mary?'

'Well. Maybe—ordinarily he'd have told me, or Helen would have told me, if they were giving shelter to some other kid. But maybe, well, maybe he—just had a girl in his room for the night.'

'I suppose it would not be terribly surprising.' Thorn sounded faintly, fondly amused. 'Men of good repute have done even stranger and more wicked things than that.'

'I know,' Mary agreed uncertainly. She was looking down at the carpet again. 'She—the girl, whoever it was —was lying right about here. Somehow they've cleaned up all the bloodstains. The white robe she was wearing had fallen open, and I could see she didn't have anything underneath it. Helen told me once that she had taken to sleeping that way, in the raw, ever since she'd been on the road.'

'Mary, I would like to hear your story of that night from the beginning. According to the news accounts—were they at all accurate?'

'Pretty much, I guess.' Mary's brashness had been fading steadily. Her voice was now almost a child's.

'According to them you heard noise, ran from your room, and came upon the dead girl. What happened next?'

'I—it's hard for me—'

'Go back and start again, Mary. You were asleep.'

The pattern in the carpet before her eyes was being melted by the onrush of night outside the windows, disappearing into darkness. She didn't want the fixed pattern to go. She held onto it desperately, resisting the voice of Thorn.

'I want you to go back and start again, Mary. Go back—'

In sudden fear, Mary turned toward him. Her hands folded themselves like the hands of a woman praying, or diving into deep water, and in a moment she had completed a soft lunging motion that brought her face into secure hiding against his chest. 'Hold me,' she murmured.

His hands held her, and they were warm. But his voice was inexorable. 'Go back. You were asleep.'

I can't do it. Her protest was silent, but vehement as any shout, and she knew that it was heard.

'I will help you. You are under my protection now. I would not ask it if it were not important. Will you not help me to find out the truth about Helen?'