Nora stood in the same spot Mrs Banwell had occupied minutes before. I had no business noticing her looks, given the harrowing events of the night before, but I couldn't help myself. It was absurd. One could walk for miles in New York City — as I had that morning — or spend a month at the Grand Central Station, and never see a single woman of surpassing physical grace. Yet in the space of five minutes, two had stood before me in the Actons' sitting room. But what a contrast between them.
Nora wore no adornments, no jewelry, no embroidered fabric. She carried no parasol; she had no veil. She wore a simple white blouse, its sleeves ending at the elbow, tucked at her impossibly narrow waist into a sky-blue pleated skirt. The top of her shirt was gently scooped, revealing the delicate structure of her collarbone and her long, lovely neck. This neck was now almost unblemished, the bruises faded. Her blond hair was pulled back as always into a braid reaching almost to her waist. She was only, as Mrs Banwell had said, a girl. Her youth cried out from every plane and curve of her, especially in the high color of her cheeks and eyes, which radiated with youth's hope, its freshness, and, I should add, its fury.
'I hate you more than anyone else I have ever known,' she said to me.
So: I was now, more than ever, hoisted into the position of her father. As if led by some inexorable fate, she had come upon me and Clara Banwell closeted in a study just as she had come upon her father and Clara Banwell consorting in another study three years ago. The signal difference — that there was nothing between Mrs Banwell and myself — was evidently lost on her. That was unsurprising. It was not I she was staring angrily at now. It was her father, dressed in my clothes. Had I been seeking to cement the analytic transference, I could not have devised a better stratagem. Had I been hoping to bring her analysis to a climax, I could not have asked for a luckier conspiracy of events. I now had the opportunity — and the duty — to try to show Nora the erroneous transposition occurring in her mind, so that she could recognize how the rage she imagined she felt toward me was actually the misdirected anger she harbored for her father.
In other words, I was obliged to bury my own emotion. I had to conceal the least shred of feeling I had for her, no matter how genuine, no matter how overpowering. 'Then I am at a disadvantage, Miss Acton,' I replied, 'because I love you more than anyone else I have ever known.'
A perfect silence enveloped us for several heartbeats.
'You do?' she asked.
'Yes.'
'But you and Clara were — '
'We weren't. I swear it.'
'You weren't?' No.'
Nora began to breathe hard. Too hard: her outer clothes were not tight, but she seemed to be wearing something underneath that was. Her respiration was entirely concentrated in the upper part of her torso. Concerned she might faint, I guided her to the front door and opened it. She needed air. Across the street was the dappled grove of Gramercy Park. Nora stepped outside. I suggested that her parents ought to know if she was going out.
'Why?' she asked me. 'We could just go to the park.'
We crossed the street and, at one of the wrought-iron gates, Nora produced from her purse a gold and black key. There was an awkward moment when I helped her through the gate: a decision had to be made about whether I would offer her my arm as we walked. I managed not to.
Therapeutically speaking, I was in a great deal of trouble. I did not fear for myself, although it was remarkable that my feelings for this girl seemed impervious to the fact that she might well be unstable or even mentally ill. If Nora had actually burned herself, there were two possibilities. Either she did it with full conscious deliberation and was lying to the world, or she did it in a dissociated state, hypnoid or somnambulistic, which was shut off from the rest of her consciousness. On the whole, I think I preferred the former alternative, but neither one was attractive.
I did not regret having confessed my feelings to her. The circumstances forced my hand. But while declaring my love for her might have been honorable, acting on it would be the opposite. The lowest-bred cur would not take advantage of a girl in her condition. I had to find a way to let her know this. I had to extricate myself from the role of lover into which I had just stumbled and try to become her physician again.
'Miss Acton,' I said.
'Won't you call me Nora, Doctor?'
'No.'
'Why?'
'Because I am still your doctor. You can't be Nora to me. You are my patient.' I wasn't sure how she would take that, but I went on. 'Tell me what happened last night. No, wait: you said in the hotel yesterday that your memory of Monday's attack had come back to you. Tell me first what you remember about that.'
'Must I?'
'Yes.'
She asked if we could sit, and we found a bench in a secluded corner. She still did not know, she said, how it all began or how she got there. That part of her memory remained missing. What she remembered was being tied up in the dark in her parents' bedroom. She was standing, bound by the wrists to something overhead. She was wearing only her slip. All the curtains and blinds were drawn.
The man was behind her. He had tied a soft piece of fabric — perhaps silk — around her throat and was pulling it so tight she couldn't breathe, much less call out. He was also hitting her with a strap or crop of some kind. It stung but it was not unbearable — more like a spanking. It was the silk around her throat that scared her; she thought he meant to kill her. But every time she was on the verge of passing out, he would relax the stranglehold ever so slightly, just enough to let her catch her breath.
He began to strike her much harder. It became so painful she thought she couldn't stand it. Then he dropped the whip, stepped behind her, so close she could feel his harsh breath on her shoulders, and put a hand on her. She didn't say where; I didn't ask. At the same time, a part of his body — 'a hard part,' she said — came into contact with her hip. The man made an ugly sound, and then he made a mistake; the tie around her throat suddenly went slack. She took a deep breath and screamed — screamed as hard and as long as she could. She must have passed out. The next thing she knew, Mrs Biggs was by her side.
Nora maintained her composure while recounting all this, her hands folded in her lap. Without changing attitude, she asked, 'Are you disgusted by me?'
'No,' I said. 'In your memory of the attack, was the man Banwell?'
'I thought so. But the mayor said — '
'The mayor said Banwell was with him Sunday night, when the other girl was murdered. If you remember Banwell being your attacker, you must say so.'
'I don't know,' said Nora plaintively. 'I think so. I don't know. He was behind me the whole time.'
'Tell me about last night,' I said.
She poured out the story of the intruder in her bedroom. This time, she said, she was certain it was Banwell. Toward the end, however, she turned away from me once more. Was there something she wasn't saying? 'I don't even own any lipstick,' she concluded earnestly. 'And that horrible thing they found in my closet. Where am I supposed to have gotten that?'
I made the obvious point: 'You are wearing makeup now.' There was the lightest hint of gloss on her lips, and the faintest blush on her cheeks.
'But this is Clara's!' she cried. 'She put it on me. She said it would suit me.'
We sat in silence for a time.
At last, she spoke. 'You don't believe a word I've said.'
'I don't believe you would lie to me.'
'But I would,' she answered. 'I have.'
'When?'
'When I said I hated you,' she replied, after a long pause.
'Tell me what you're keeping back.'
'What do you mean?' she asked.
'There is something else about last night — something that makes you doubt yourself.'
'How do you know?' she demanded.
