“She smiled at everybody.”
“I guess so. At some people especially. One time after you were in for supper and left, she said something about how quiet you were and that you weren’t as tough as you think you are.”
“I don’t think I’m tough.”
“I wouldn’t know. It’s just something I overheard.”
I’d overheard some things last night myself; I felt a little uncomfortable in my private knowledge, of my having been an unseen spectator last night, during her fun and games with Turner or Thomas or whatever he might call himself. An asshole by any other name…
She was sitting in a shadow and her features were indistinct. Then I realized I was providing the shadow, and moved, and got a better look at her. She was still small and tan, with a lot of dark hair falling down behind her shoulders, pulled away from a pretty if not striking face that looked thirteen and thirty. Her eyes, I remembered, were Wilma’s: her eyes, today, were haunted. She was wearing a sweatshirt that said MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN on it, and jeans; both were baggy and obscured the mature figure I’d seen through the keyhole.
“Are you here for a reason?”
“I’m sorry about your aunt.”
“I know. Thank you for taking time to say so.”
I said nothing.
“Please. I don’t mean to be rude, but could you go, now? I’d like to sit here alone and just be kind of quiet for a while.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, either, but I need to ask you some questions.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know about your friend. Mr. Thomas. Room twelve?”
Her face went pale, or tried to, under the tan. She rose and said, “I’m going in the house, now.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“No…”
“Then sit back down on the swing.”
“I won’t…”
“I talked to him last night. Your aunt asked me to. To tell him to lay off you.”
“She did. And what did he say?”
“He said you had the hairiest tight little pussy he ever dove into.”
Her mouth fell open in a kind of horror and she covered it with one cupping hand and sat back down on the swing and began to weep, convulsively.
It wasn’t a nice thing to say, and was of course a lie; but it got her attention.
“He isn’t a nice man, your Mr. Thomas.”
“Neither… neither… neither are you.”
“That’s true. But I’m not here to fuck you.”
“Do you… have to use language like that?”
“I know some of my words aren’t pretty. Neither is the world, sometimes. Neither was the sight of your aunt at the bottom of those steps with her neck broken, I’d imagine.”
“Oh, please… please stop.”
I sat on the swing by her. I reached out to touch her shoulder, then thought better of it. I tried to put the intent of that gesture into the sound of my voice.
“I want you to tell me what happened this morning,” I said. “Something happened between you, your aunt and Mr. Thomas. Tell me what it is.”
She looked at me with big, beautiful wet blue eyes. They grabbed at me somewhere, in the back of my throat or in my stomach or somewhere, where I didn’t know I could be reached anymore, and held me and I had this crazy urge to reach out to her, to hold her, and not for any reason remotely sexual, but then the urge passed, and I was glad it did.
“How did you know?” she said.
“I didn’t,” I said. “Not for sure. Until you confirmed it just now.”
“Please… please don’t play any more of these games with me.”
“No games. I had a good idea something happened. It might have happened just between your aunt and Mr. Thomas, without you around. But when I saw you, here, on the swing, I could tell. I could tell you were there.”
“I wasn’t there when it happened. I didn’t know my aunt had… fallen… until I saw her, when Charley and I, we found her, this morning. But I was there, earlier, when…” And she shuddered.
“Go on.”
“I got up this morning. About seven. And I went over to Paul… to Mr. Thomas’s room, and knocked. And went in. And…”
“And you went in and did some things.”
“Yes.”
“And your aunt came around and barged in on you two?”
“Yes. That’s about it.”
“Then what?”
“She was pretty mad. I thought she’d have a heart attack. I was really worried. Mr. Thomas was very calm, though. He sort of took it in stride, didn’t raise his voice to her or anything. He got out of bed and used this reasoning tone with her and at the same time was getting his pants on… it was, I can’t think of any other way to put it, it was kind of impressive.”
Turner had practice getting caught in bed with women. He had his act down pat; he’d be a cinch on the Amateur Hour, if Ted Mack wasn’t dead.
“My aunt told me to go home, to go back to bed and… she said
… and sleep this time. Real sarcastic. I almost… I hated her when she said that. That’s the part that hurts, isn’t that silly? That for a second I hated her and I think, I think maybe I even consciously thought it, thought, I wish that fat bitch would go off someplace and die, and… she did.”
The girl looked at me blankly, but the blankness quickly dissolved into more tears and I let her cry a while.
“So they were arguing when you left,” I said, when it began to let up.
“Yes.”
“You know that your friend has flown the coop.”
“Yes. I went up to his room. It looked like he left in a hurry.”
“It sure did. Then what do you think really happened?”
“I don’t know. It was an accident, it had to be. They were arguing and she went storming out of the room and lost her step and… just fell. Maybe? Or… God. Or they came to blows and he accidently slapped her or something and she fell or… I don’t know. It’s upsetting. It’s scary as hell, too.”
“Well he’s gone.”
“Maybe I don’t blame him. For going. No. No, that’s not right. I do blame him. I wish…”
“What do you wish?”
“I wish I could hate him.”
“You want some free advice?”
“I think maybe I could use it.”
“Forget about this. It was an accident.”
“Do you really think that?”
“I don’t know. But I just talked to Charley, and he’s very shaken by it He said he wished this wasn’t an accident, so he could have somebody to blame. If he knew about your Mr. Thomas, I’m afraid he’d go looking for him. And kill him.”
“Oh… oh. Oh.”
“And you wouldn’t want that.”
“No.”
“So sit there and swing and think and then forget.”
“And then what?”
